Ireland's 'Kerry Cow' Bones Are Actually Wild Boar and Bear, Shaking Up the Story of Farming's Arrival on the Island

Between 1983 and 1995, archaeologists in Ireland unearthed a collection of 6,500-year-old cattle bones—or so they thought. A new analysis of the remains indicates that they belonged to bear and wild boar, not domestic cattle. The discovery challenges long-standing assumptions about when farming arrived in Ireland.

The findings, outlined in Past, the newsletter of the nonprofit Prehistoric Society, will likely have a “significant impact” on archaeologists’ understanding of the shift from mobile hunter-gatherer foraging to settled agricultural life in the region, the researchers write. The so-called Kerry cow bones were discovered in Ferriter’s Cove, a bay in County Kerry, on the western tip of the Dingle Peninsula, located in the far southwest corner of Ireland. Some of the bones, which were found alongside human remains, were radiocarbon dated to between 4450 and 4270 B.C.E., during the Late Mesolithic period.

For the past three decades, archaeologists have cited the cow bones as evidence that Ireland’s Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had interacted with Europe’s early Neolithic farmers before 4000 B.C.E. However, researchers at University College Dublin and University College Cork, where the bones are stored, recently decided to take another look at the remains. Last year, scientists revealed that mammoth remains discovered in Alaska actually belonged to two different species of whales, a North Pacific right whale and a minke whale.

The Ireland-based team sent the bones to the French National Center for Scientific Research lab in Lille, France, for further testing and analysis. Using a technique called zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry to analyze proteins preserved in the bone collagen, the researchers determined that the remains belonged to bear and wild boar—not cattle. The “Kerry cow” bones had long been regarded as some of the earliest evidence of domesticated animals in Ireland, but since they didn’t come from such species after all, that timeline may no longer hold up.

Based on the new findings, archaeologists may need to rethink their assumptions about the changeover from hunting and gathering during the Mesolithic to farming in the Neolithic. At this point, it’s not clear which type of bear the bones belonged to, but researchers are working to identify the species. Initial guesses include a brown bear or a polar bear.

These results, the scholars write, could answer ongoing questions about the extinction and hybridization of bears in Ireland. Brown bears are believed to have gone extinct in Ireland during the Bronze Age, but research suggests that they mated and reproduced with polar bears before dying out. Overall, the findings demonstrate the value of investigating old archaeological materials using new techniques, the researchers say.