CURIOSITIES:MARCH 1859, AND the remains of "an antediluvian giant" are being paraded through the streets of Dungarvan, Co Waterford. Well, if you had been working in the local Shandon quarry then, and stumbled on some enormous bones, you'd probably think it was a giant, too, writes Mary Mulvihill.
Take a look at the "gigantic" thigh bone, now on display at the National Museum, Collins Barracks in Dublin and see for yourself.
One stonemason described the find as "a cartload of beef and mutton bones". Some soup they'd make! Instead, most were sold for crushing into bonemeal, until Edward Brenan, local postmaster and keen-eyed amateur antiquarian, realised that the "giant" on parade was in fact a mammoth, and the first ever found in Ireland. Hurrying to the site - a cave revealed by the quarrying - he found loads more bones, many from other prehistoric species, including reindeer and bear.
For Brenan, these were a sign from God. The creatures ended up in the cave because, as he outlined in a pamphlet that summer, they had died in the biblical Flood.
"Men fled to the tops of the highest mountains," he wrote - neatly explaining why no human remains had been found in the cave - "and the wild animals . . . sought shelter in the caves . . . and there at once together died." Oh, and the flood carried the mammoth's body all the way from Siberia.
In fact, the mammoth was Irish, but Brenan was partly right about the flood: some 25,000-30,000 years ago, during a mild spell between two ice ages, torrents of meltwater flooded down from northern glaciers to this part of Ireland, excavating caves and depositing bones en route.
The Shandon bones are now in the National Museum, but you can read an account of the find and excavations on Dungarvan Museum's excellent website (see url.ie/oz8).
In 1928, there was more excitement when some visiting British geologists found human remains in another nearby cave, alongside bones from a giant deer, a species that disappeared from Ireland about 10,000 years ago.
Could this "Kilgreany Man" be Ireland's oldest inhabitant? Had he hunted the giant deer? Sadly, the excitement was short-lived: the human bones were dated to a mere 4,500 years ago, presumably washed into the cave and jumbled up with the even older deer bones by yet another flood.