© itsligovideosThe brown bear bone.
Since the 1970s, the oldest evidence of human occupation in Ireland dated back to 8,000 BC - the Mesolithic period - indicating humans had occupied the island for some 10,000 years.
However, radiocarbon dating of a brown bear's knee bone suggested it had been killed by a human some 12,500 years ago, in the preceding Paleolithic period, at 10,500 BC.
The adult bear bone, marked by seven cuts from a long blade, was originally discovered in 1903 by a team of early scientists in a County Clare cave and had been stored in a card board box at the National Museum of Ireland for almost 100 years.
In 2010 and 2011 Dr Ruth Carden, a research associate with the National Museum of Ireland, and Dr Marion Dowd, a lecturer in Prehistoric Archaeology at the School of science in IT Sligo, re-analysed the bear bone, which was one of thousands discovered at the turn of the century.
The pair then applied for funding to have the bone carbon dated.
"When a Palaeolithic date was returned, it came as quite a shock," said Dr Dowd. "Here we had evidence of someone butchering a brown bear carcass and cutting through the knee probably to extract the tendons."
Comment: From day one, apparently, Putin has had the Powers That Be periodically 'breaking out in sweats'!
Again we see that the 'Cold War' was entirely of the West's making. The US needed the Cold War to cement its post-WW2 position as 'world government'.
Russia, or the USSR, were not allowed to join NATO because its influence would interfere with NATO's true purpose: to establish and maintain Western, specifically Anglo-American, global hegemony.
Note that the Warsaw Pact was only formed AFTER the USSR was refused, thus completely undermining the revisionist NATO history which justifies its original existence as necessary to counter a Soviet (really, a Russian) military threat to Europe.
Once NATO (Washington and London) refused Russian entry into NATO, the Russians realized NATO's true purpose, and after having only just survived the most titanic war in all history, Russia thus had no choice but to establish a counter-alliance.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...