Ancient site ‘older than Newgrange’ discovered in Cork
ARCHAEOLOGISTS have found an ‘extremely exciting’ site along the route of the new M28 motorway in Co. Cork, including a farmer’s home that is older than Newgrange.
A team of around 50 archaeologists have been excavating dozens of sites before construction begins on the new road, which will connect the port of Ringaskiddy with the Jack Lynch Tunnel.
And they have discovered a home they believe to have belonged to one of the first farmers to settle the area, along with a burial ground, weapons, tools and pottery.
Archaeologist Shirley Clot found a spear tip in a ditch.
The Neolithic dwelling has been dated to 3,700 BC, making it around 500 years older than Newgrange and more than a thousand years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Transport Infrastructure Ireland archaeologist Ken Hanley told RTÉ the home was ‘a simple timber structure, probably thatched, that would have housed a single family, and there may well in the general vicinity have been other similar houses that formed part of a community’.
He said the evidence suggested a community of people who arrived in Cork Harbour with their livestock, introducing farming practices to what had been a nomadic, hunter-gatherer society until then.
‘The evidence so far seems to suggest that it was an influx of people, that they brought their livestock, their families and the whole farming package with them, and they started building these houses,’ Mr Hanley said.
‘It’s basically the first farming community to arrive in this part of Cork Harbour. It’s an extremely exciting find for us,’ he said.