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July 27, 2008
Flint hints at existence of Palaeolithic man in Ireland
200,000 year-old flaked flint is certainly of human workmanship, but
its ultimate origin remains uncertain
Norman Hammond
Archaeology Correspondent
The possibility of a Palaeolithic human presence in Ireland has once
again presented itself. A flaked flint dating to about 200,000 years
ago found in Co Down is certainly of human workmanship, but its
ultimate origin remains uncertain.
Discovered at Ballycullen, ten miles east of Belfast, the flake is
68mm long and wide and 31mm thick. Its originally dark surface is
heavily patinated to a yellowish shade, and the lack of sharpness in
its edges suggests that it has been rolled around by water or ice, Jon
Stirland reports in Archaeology Ireland.
Dr Farina Sternke has identified it as a classic Levallois-type flake
from the rejuvenation of a flint core; such flakes are characteristic
of stone-tool industries made by archaic humans of the pre-Neanderthal
era, as technology moved towards making multiple flakes from one core
and then trimming them into a variety of different tool types.
The date assigned of between 240,000 and 180,000 years matches a
similar flake discovered by the late Professor Frank Mitchell near
Drogheda, Co Louth, 40 years ago, which has until now been the only
uncontested Palaeolithic tool from Ireland.
The problem, as with the Drogheda flake, lies in the context: the
Ballycullen specimen was shown to have come from a drumlin mound,
deposited by glacial activity. The last such activity in Co Down was
about 16,000 years ago, and the ice sheet had spread west from
Scotland.
Other materials in the drumlin led Dr Ian Mitchell, of the Geological
Survey of Northern Ireland, to suggest that the flake could have been
transported “a significant distance, from eastern Antrim, from the sea
bed in the North Channel, or even from the West Coast of Scotland”,
the same conclusion that Professor Mitchell came to about the Drogheda
specimen in 1968. So the evidence for the earliest Irish remains
enticing, but tenuous.
Archaeology Ireland Vol. 22 No. 1: 23-24
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