Prehistoric feline discover is first for Eire

The invention of a 5,500-year-old wildcat in a collapse Co Clare marks a breakthrough in understanding Eire’s prehistoric wildlife.

Whereas archaeologists have lengthy believed wildcats have been current in Eire in prehistoric instances, it is just now that we now have proof.

The bones of a wildcat from the Neolithic interval have been uncovered throughout archaeological excavations in Glencurran Cave within the Burren, Co Clare.

Glencurran Cave has been a hub of human and animal exercise for hundreds of years, Atlantic Technological College’s Dr Marion Dowd defined on an ATU podcast not too long ago.

For instance, throughout the Bronze Age, the cave was used as a ritual area and other people left choices there. There’s proof to counsel that bears lived within the cave at one level. A couple of thousand years in the past, totally different particular person individuals lived within the cave. And even now a goat lives there.

Dowd and the analysis workforce have labored within the cave for a number of years and have discovered greater than 35,000 animal bones, together with from bears, wolves, cattle, foxes, pigs, geese, canines and cats.

Zooarchaeologist Margaret McCarthy oversaw the evaluation of the animal bones to determine the totally different species.

Researchers at Queen’s College Belfast radiocarbon dated the 39 cat bones that have been found and confirmed they’re greater than 5,500 years previous.

“Little by little we began radiocarbon courting among the bones and once we radiocarbon dated the cat, we have been actually stunned to get such an early date. That was very thrilling,” Dowd mentioned.

The workforce suspected this could be a wildcat however wanted to do historical DNA (aDNA) evaluation to verify. Prof Claudio Ottoni and his workforce on the College of Rome Tor Vergata did the sequencing and recognized the cat as a European wildcat – distinct from each fashionable home cats (Felis catus) and Close to Japanese wildcats (F lybica lybica).

Their evaluation confirmed that the Glencurran wildcat was a male and belonged to an historical European lineage, intently associated to wildcats from Italy and Spain, relatively than the fashionable Scottish inhabitants.

“That is the primary time we will say with certainty that European wildcats lived in prehistoric Eire. It transforms what we thought we knew about Eire’s historical wildlife,” Dowd mentioned.

The Glencurran wildcat belongs to a a lot older, wilder lineage than our home cats at this time, she mentioned.

Though comparable in dimension and look to home cats, wildcats are a definite species. They favour forest habitats and are largely solitary and nocturnal. The species was as soon as widespread throughout Europe, however populations declined sharply from the 1700s onwards as a result of habitat loss, searching and competitors with home cats.

Dowd mentioned this new discover raises questions on how wildcats first got here to Eire. Had been wildcats launched by early hunter-gatherers throughout the Mesolithic interval, or did they arrive hundreds of years later with Neolithic farmers? How lengthy did they survive in Eire earlier than extinction? And why have so few stays from prehistoric cats been discovered?

“We merely don’t know when wildcats arrived in Eire or once they vanished.

“Medieval writers point out wildcats within the Irish panorama, however these could have been feral home cats. Confusion can also be widespread with the pine marten – recognized in Irish as cat crainn, or ‘cat of the timber’.”

Dowd mentioned that researchers must radiocarbon date and analyse the cat bones discovered at different prehistoric websites throughout Eire. By investigating all extant stays, it could be doable to know how wildcats reached Eire, how they lived, and when and why they vanished from the Irish panorama.

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