a snapshot, limited snapshot, of what species was present (or their absence) here. Something we must always remember. We will continue tomorrow evening with some of our more recent research & finish up on Friday evening. Thanks for reading & I'm sure lots of Qs!
More tomorrow night. If you have gotten this far, thank you for taking time to read the journey, and origins story of this project.
Thurs. eve - how time flies by!!
The year 2020, brought yet another huge loss in terms of a great supporter of my/our cave research, loss of knowledge and invaulable regular discussions, the sudden passing of the geologist, Dr Matthew Parkes of the National Museum of Ireland.
Matthew was always so interested & willingly to help in any way he could. Great to have that backbone of support in the Museum. A huge loss to the community & I will miss his prank scares of me in the stores,in one sense,always ended in laughter shared between us.
Meanwhile, in the pandemic time, my research physically on the bones ceased but not on the paper research end of things, or the thinking, teasing out, reviewing the work I had already achieved. I reached out to Helen Lewis again in UCD and much chats were had.
I also had continued my collaborative research with Richard Jennings in Liverpool John Moores University, along with Allan McDevitt. Allan and I had devised a piece of research back in 2017 and things were moving along, slowly, but moving. The only funding we ...
we got for this new piece of exciting research was 7 radiocarbon dates from the Royal Irish Academy & the Irish Quaternary Association and that's it, yet again research on a shoe string, but that shoe string turned out to be VERY significant. Because both Allan and I were working full time ...
in other jobs at the time, the research and what was needed to eventually form a strong paper for submission to a suitable international journal, things moved slowly. Always in the right direction but given lack of dedicated funding we could only do so much.
To address other lines of supporting evidence we invited certain colleagues for specific jobs onto this peice of work. Things were moving very nicely and in good time up to early 2020 (then Covid hit and we were stalled at cruical times). But in Winter 2019,
I had taken part in a Irish TV documentary series by Katrina Costello of Silver Branch Films, and thought there was loads of time prior to airing in April 2021, so finish the research, and submit the paper and have it published for all to see. Then the pandemic hit - hard stop!
Next year this paper will shine in all its glory and I'd love to discuss it then :)
So, the people I have been working with closely, Allan, Richard, Helen on the #IrishCaveBones project, we have others we collaborate and work with too - an extended network of people, including ancient geneticists - Prof. Dan Bradley in Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and others
Dan is involved in the previous research that must not be named as yet, as is Patrick Randolph-Quinney et al., which will complete that research that got severely delayed due to COVID.
Another really cool collaboration was with Pontus Skoglund
and Anders Bergstrom
and others, where Richard and I contributed knowledge and samples towards a wolf-dog project - this was published this year in a fantastic Nature paper led by Anders. Albeit we had small parts ...
to play in this, Irish samples were included. As Ireland is situated on the far edge of NW Europe and became a island shortly after the Ice Sheet and LGM ended, we are an important area for how species adapt and survive. It all ties in and it's great to still be collaborating ...
with Pontus and his team on many levels using wolves and dogs from the caves and elsewhere. The Nature wolf - dog paper is below, and with 100,000 years of genomic ancient DNA shows dual ancestry in dogs from wolves.
Now we are in the realm of recent and ongoing active research including fieldwork in Irish caves. Richard, Helen and I co-applied to the @RIAdawson
for archaeological excavating funding in 2021, and we were successful.
In early summer 2022, we followed in RJ Ussher's footsteps in Castlepook cave, Co. Cork and started our first season of a research archaeological excavation at the cave.
We had/have an amazing team of people we are working with on this project - we are working in conjunction with the Cork Speological Group who volunteer their time with us, to make the cave safe for our brilliant cave archaeologists to work in & are on hand.
To give an idea of conditions inside Castlepook cave where our cave archaeologists had to work, and the assists at very tricky/difficult points provided by the Cork Speological Group which we are extremely grateful for, see the photos... our cave archaeologists were very brave!
Our analysis on samples obtained from our first season is ongoing. Pleistocene and Holocene animal species' bones were found and identified - spot the Arctic lemming tooth in the cave sieved sediment sample - (Hint: it's near the middle of the photo)
We took soil/sediment micromorphology samples, sediment for ancient DNA analysis, excavated animal bones (select few will be subjected to radiocarbon dating), we also laser mapped the cave interior, and photogrammetry of the exterior. All analysis should be ...
completed by first quarter of 2023 and we are planning our next field season at Castlepook cave already.
Tomorrow I shall finish up this story, but it's not the end. If you have kept up this week, I thank you for your interest in our research. See ye tomor eve!
I'm not going to sugarcoat it, but I became very disheartened. I thought have the publication of the Upper Palaeolithic human cut brown bear knee cap from Alice and Gwendoline cave (Edenvale cave complex, Co. Clare), which was amazing and #IrishCaveBones
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379116300610
Ruth Carden 🦴
