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Researchers using an artificial intelligence survey tool say markings found in eight caves in southwest Ireland could be the island's earliest known Ice Age cave art, a discovery that may reshape understanding of when humans first arrived there.
DUBLIN, September 2026, markings discovered inside eight caves in southwest Ireland this past summer could push back the known timeline of human settlement on the island by several thousand years, according to researchers involved in the Lost Land Bridge Project. The team believes the markings, if confirmed through further testing, would represent the earliest documented Ice Age cave art found in Ireland, and suggests the people who made them may have walked to Ireland across a land bridge from Wales that has since disappeared.
The communications office of this publication issues formal releases on developments in archaeology and earth sciences as part of its ongoing coverage of scientific discovery, and is reporting on these findings as researchers work to verify their age and origin.
According to the research team, Ireland has long occupied an unusual position in the study of prehistoric Europe. For decades, evidence suggested the island was among the last parts of northwest Europe to be settled by early humans, arriving well after people had already spread across Britain and the continent. That conclusion, the team notes, rested on a limited set of evidence, namely bones bearing cut marks, rather than painted or engraved cave art of the kind found elsewhere in Europe. Because confirmed cave art from the Ice Age period has effectively never been documented in Ireland, researchers say any dating that falls within the range of 15,000 to 10,000 years ago would require a reconsideration of how and when people first reached the island.
The project is led by palaeoanthropologist and rock art specialist Genevieve von Petzinger, working with George Nash and Barbara Oosterwijk. Over the course of the summer, the team documented several categories of intentional markings across the caves, including finger flutings, which are lines traced by hand through soft cave wall surfaces, along with markings made using ochre and charcoal, some of which appear to depict the silhouettes of animals.
Von Petzinger said the finger flutings offered a particularly useful chronological clue, noting that more than 90 percent of known sites containing this type of marking date to the Ice Age. She also said that outside of well known "show caves" such as Altamira in Spain or Lascaux in France, researchers typically find only faint scratchings or remnants of paintings, which makes the density of markings found in the southwest Ireland caves unusual by comparison, according to the team.
To confirm the age and origin of the markings, researchers plan to conduct radiocarbon dating on charcoal samples, Raman spectroscopy on the red pigment, and uranium series dating of calcite deposits found at the sites. The team also intends to attempt ancient DNA analysis directly on the finger flutings, using a method von Petzinger previously tested at a site in Málaga, Spain.
The search for the markings was guided by a hypothesis that falling sea levels during the Late Ice Age reshaped the coastline around Ireland, potentially creating a walkable route to Wales, according to a BBC report cited by the researchers. That idea draws on earlier geological research from the BRITICE Glacial Mapping Project, though von Petzinger has said the land bridge theory remains unproven. The theory gained additional support, researchers said, from rock art recently dated to at least 17,100 years ago at Bacon Hole, a sea cave in Wales, now considered the oldest confirmed rock art in northwestern Europe. Speaking to The Art Newspaper, von Petzinger said, "If humans lived in Wales during the Ice Age, why not walk across when it was close?"
Rather than surveying caves at random, the team relied on an artificial intelligence system called LIACARA, short for the Living Intelligent Archive of Ancient Culture, Art, and Relational Archaeology, which von Petzinger designed. The system draws on archaeological records, maps, images and published research, and the team supplied it with additional data on limestone formations, water sources, and historical sea and glacier levels. Von Petzinger described the process by saying, "We taught AI to hand us a heat map of places most likely to have the converging factors that could lead to caves and human presence."
Of the 28 caves the system identified as promising, researchers physically inspected each one and found markings worthy of closer study in eight of them. The exact locations of the caves are being kept confidential to protect the sites, according to the team. Researchers have said they eventually intend to make LIACARA publicly accessible, describing it as a tool designed to help investigators connect scattered evidence, identify patterns, and trace conclusions back to the underlying data.
