Yeah, I remember reading about the questioning of the original dates. The short excerpt I found mentioned that he'd been back and re took samples of charcoal a few years ago, and the dates still correlate roughly. Think the text mentions other burial sites still earlier. I recall being dubious about the West to East spread of megalithic culture when I was at college, but more evidence does seem to be accruing to support this hypothesis. It's an interesting field of study, that's fer sure. What was in that Irish water?

Interesting thanks! The tldr I get from that is poor or no context for the really old dates, otherwise some dates reasonably sound centred about 39-3700 BC at the earliest.

Now if we could only date menhirs, then I think we might start to see some dates pushing back to the mesolithic.