Irish brown bear no polar ancestor

THE claim, made two years ago, that the polar bears alive today had Irish brown bear ancestors has been turned on its head.

According to Beth Shapiro, of the University of California at Santa Cruz: “We were wrong about the directionality of the gene flow between polar bears and Irish brown bears.”

Shapiro is co-author of a paper appearing in the current edition of PLOS Genetics. The brown bear was in Ireland when our hunter-gatherer forebears arrived 9,000 years ago. It became extinct four to six millennia later. Dr Ceiridwen Edwards, working at Trinity College Dublin, examined mitochondrial DNA from the teeth and bones of 17 bears found in eight Irish caves.