Pork in Ireland

rdf:langString Pork in Ireland

rdf:langString Pork in Ireland has been a key part of the Irish diet since prehistory. Ireland's flora and fauna overwhelmingly arrived via a Neolithic land bridge from Great Britain prior to its submerging around 12,000 BP. When the very first hunter-gatherers arrived around 2,000 years later, the local ecosystem largely resembled that of modern Ireland. Dating back to Neolithic times, large amounts of pig bones have been found near habitations. There is evidence of wild boar consumption dating as early as 9000 BP, at a Mesolithic site in, about 1,000 years before farming began in Ireland. Evidence of Stone Age farming survives in the Céide Fields in north County Mayo. Discovered in the 1930s, they are the world's oldest known extant field system and among the world's most extensive Stone Age ruins. Excavations of animal bones at the Newgrange site in County Meath in the 1960s confirmed that cattle and pigs were the primary food animals circa 4000 BP, with pig bones the more dominant of the two.