The last Ice Age, which has lasted around a million years, is drawing to a close. An ice sheet covers Ireland as far south as what we call Dublin and Galway. Nobody lives in the place we call Ireland, which is not yet an island. Co. Antrim, near the River Bann. These are the earliest known people in Ireland, and are here 6,500 years before the Celts.
Neolithic farmers arrive, bringing Ireland's first cattle, sheep, goats, wheat and barley.
For thousands of years the diet of people in Ireland will mainly comprise meat and dairy products, since the Irish climate lends itself to semi-nomadic pastoral farming. To build Newgrange would have taken 400 people, working for the summer months, at least 16 years. People start to wear beautiful gold jewellery. They introduce the horse and flax to Ireland. According to the seventeenth-century Annals of the Four Masters, Tighearmas, king of Ireland, is the first person to dye clothes blue, purple and green.