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

The bones were discovered on the Dingle Peninsula more than 30 years ago, but scientists recently decided to take another look at them, this time using modern techniques

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

August 20, 2026 10:40 a.m.

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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. “It became clear that the original species identifications were ambiguous and tentative,” they write in the newsletter.

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.

“These results have a significant impact on our understanding of the Mesolithic-Neolithic ‘transition’ both in Ireland and in Western Europe more broadly since, as things stand, there is now no evidence of contact between Ireland and its Neolithic neighbors before 4000” B.C.E., the researchers write.

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. More specifically, the results suggest that the archaeological record may hold more clues about Ireland’s Mesolithic hunter-gatherers than is often assumed.

“For at least four millennia, hunting and gathering people lived on the island, and there is a common conception that they left little trace and that we know very little about them,” Martin Moucheron, an archaeologist at University College Dublin who led the recent research, says in a statement. “But there is much we can understand about Mesolithic people just by going back to the sites and material we have, and by looking at them with new eyes and new techniques—and an open mind.”

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.