Over the past 25 years, Prof Peter Woodman of UCC and his team of researchers have shown that although people have lived on the island of Ireland for at least 10,000 years, for almost half that time, their lives were lived without the benefit of farming. However, their lives were not without sophistication and planning.
In general, says Prof Woodman, these early Stone Age hunters and fishers have received a bad press and were often assumed to have led an almost brutish existence, moving from site to site in search of new sources of sustenance.
However, excavations at Ferriters Cove in Co Kerry have revealed they knew much more about planning their lives than would have been expected.
The Ferriters Cove work has given some insights into how important the sea was to the Stone Age communities and what happened when farming arrived in Ireland, but now attention is switching to Lough Swilly in Co Donegal.
Some 150 years ago, an amateur geologist found shells alongside primitive stone tools in the Inch Island area of Lough Swilly.
Some of the sites were over 50 metres long and up to a metre thick. They had been almost forgotten until Prof Woodman rediscovered a reference to the sites.
He found that local amateurs had identified several places where portions of these Stone Age shell mounds survived. Now, with the help of Dúchas, he and his team, together with Dr Nicky Miller of Newcastle, have been working to record the sites and to unravel the lifestyle of these early people.
Already, the sites have shown that the Stone Age communities collected a range of shellfish, and fished for other species as well as catching crabs and birds and hunting animals, such as wild boar.
The indications are that the shoreline locations were in use when farming first appeared in the area.
Intriguingly, Prof Woodman believes evidence has already been uncovered to suggest that the sea suddenly became much less important to the erstwhile fish-eaters. It looks, he says, "as if the Irish resistance to eating fish was due to more than being forced to eat it on Fridays."