Timeline of Human Activity in Ancient Ireland is 33,000 Years Old! Signs of early human activity in Ireland dating back to a stunning 33,000 years have been found on a bone fragment which was unearthed in cave over 100 years ago. This paradigm-changing discovery instantly negates everything archaeologists though they knew about humans in ancient Ireland, and across the entirety of western Europe during the Upper Paleolithic. If you were to Google search “the first people in Ireland” right now, you would read that between 12,000 and 9,000 years ago (around 7000 BC) “Stone Age” people arrived on the island and used stone tools for hunting. However, by the end of today, that same search result will have changed and it will have tripled in age to state that evidence of human activity in ancient Ireland has been discovered dating back to 33,000 years ago.