Ireland Read Free

These would have been cutters and scrapers made from flint. They would also have brought some flint-tipped spears and flint axes with which to defend themselves and for hunting when they reached land. It’s possible that they also had some form of net, probably made from lengths of plaited strips of bark or even from animal sinews, with which they could catch fish. They would also have small pieces of flint and tinder with them so that they could light a fire when they arrived in the new land.
    With other members of their group watching apprehensively from the edge of the water they would have launched their boat, scrambled aboard and with simple oars pulled away from the shore. They would have left at dawn on a calm summer morning with the intention of reaching their destination by nightfall. Perhaps the women and children were crying, unsure if they would ever see their loved ones again.
    Though they did not write things down, nor paint pictures on the walls of caves, nor carve sculptures in stone, these people still left evidence of their existence. We have found their flint tools and the bones of the animals and fish they ate and the shells of the hazelnuts they gathered and the ashes from their cooking fires.
    Just close your eyes for a moment and imagine them gathered around a huge blazing fire eating roast boar. You can almost smell it! When they’ve eaten, someone starts to recount the story of that day’s hunt; or perhaps a hunt from the past. There’s no sound to be heard except the crackle of the fire and the voice of the hunter as he recounts the moment when the boar charged and he thought he would be killed. As his voice drops at the moment of greatest suspense, everyone is listening enthralled. Just look at the faces of those children with their eyes wide open in amazement. Aren’t they just like you as you watch an episode of your favourite programme on TV?
    Now glance at a man or a woman sitting around that fire. Could they be your ancestors, or even mine? How can we know? Perhaps that storyteller is your great-great-great – imagine a page of greats – grandfather from 9,000 years ago. But he, too, had a father and a grandfather and a great-grandfather – and so we go on back further and further in time. How far back? Again we do not know.
    Now do you see why those people from 9,000 years ago and those who came before them and after them are relevant to us today? It’s why history is so important. History tells us about who we are and where we came from – it tells us about those people who lived and died thousands of years before we were even born. Without them, you see, we wouldn’t exist.
    Their history is our history, all 9,000 years of it. It’s the link between all those people who have lived and us. In a thousand years from now people will look back at us and see us as part of history. And just as you wouldn’t like them to think that we were of little importance, so we should not think that those who came before us are not important either.
    So though history is all about the past, it is very relevant to us living here in the present too. And now that you realise this, sit back and let’s see what happened to all those people who lived and died in Ireland over the past 9,000 years. At times it is a sad story, but it is also a thrilling and exciting story – the story of Ireland and its people.

3
The Age of Stone
    T he first people who came to Ireland lived during the Stone Age. We call it the Stone Age because the tools they used were made from stone. The Stone Age is divided into three periods – Old Stone Age, Middle Stone Age and New Stone Age – by the type of stone tools used. In the Old Stone Age simple tools were made from stone. By the Middle Stone Age tools were made from flint. During the New Stone Age, these flint tools were highly crafted. We know from tools found at the sites where those people first settled that they lived in the Middle Stone Age.
    Over time, other