The First Irish

The Ancients

History Hit

History

4.7 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2024

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over 10,000 years ago, many believe Ireland was a place where hunter-gatherers roamed. A place where the earliest human communities exchanged prizes of the hunt and crafted primitive tools to aid their survival. But what if their interactions with each other were more sophisticated? What if hunter-gatherer is a misnomer?

In the episode of the Ancients, Tristan Hughes speaks to Professor Graeme Warren about Ireland's rich prehistoric archaeology to discover how the earliest communities lived their lives. What do we know about these first people who made the island of Ireland their home?

They also discuss how the remnants of Ireland’s distant Mesolithic past shed light on the shared practices between Ireland and other parts of Mesolithic Europe and how the Irish Sea played a significant role in the exchange of culture between those regions.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's the Enchamps on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's episode
0:14.9	while we're heading to prehistoric island finally. I have become fascinated by
0:20.1	islands archaeology in recent months and many of you have been requesting that we cover this island. by islands earliest communities who made Ireland their home, how they lived and survived on the
0:36.1	Emerald Isle.
0:38.1	Joining me to explain all about this, I was delighted to have Professor Graham Warren dial in from Dublin.
0:44.3	Graham has written extensively on Ireland's prehistoric archaeology
0:48.0	with a particular focus on the mesolithic or middle stone age
0:52.0	that began roughly 10,000 years ago.
0:55.8	This was a time before farming when we popularly labeled people hunter-gatherers, but there are some issues with that labeling as you're going to hear in today's
1:05.3	episode. I really do hope you enjoy, and here's Graham. Graham, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.
1:18.0	Well, thank you very much for the opportunity.
1:20.0	I'm looking forward to the chance to chat.
1:21.0	I've been fascinated by prehistoric island for so long now and finally getting around to do an episode on at least part of it and we're going back to the Mesolithic so like Stone Age, before farming.
1:33.6	And Graham, this is a really exciting but also an ever evolving field.
1:37.7	More information is being revealed about these very early people who made Ireland their
1:41.5	home, about their lifestyles and so on it
1:43.8	it's exciting at the moment. Yeah there's been loads happening and loads changing
1:47.6	we've got a good team of people working on the kind of university research
1:51.6	side of things but there's also always material turning up on excavations in advance of
1:57.1	infrastructural development. So we have a compared to where we were 15 or 20 years ago, we actually have quite a good body of evidence to try and tell the story of those people's lives.
2:07.6	Well, we will definitely get into exploring all that material as we go.
2:11.6	But first thing's first, no such thing as a silly question.
	...

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