@gingerhowley
Assistant Professor at UCD. Young Academy Ireland. https://t.co/ZQ4XYYxM7H Ancient DNA, goats, sheep (begrudgingly), pathogens, climate, MTG, Traitors. I watch too many films: http://letterboxd.com/GingerHowley He is openly gay (citation needed).
Join us Friday 27th March at ** 9am GMT ** for our AaRC TikTalk seminar, given this month by two exciting Australian-based researchers Loukas Koungoulos (dingos!) and Siobhan Evans (cave sediment!) #adna @aarc-community.bsky.social
Registration is now open for our next online AaRCademy workshop focusing on relatedness! #aDNA
#AaRCademy is back with another animal #aDNA workshop. This time, @jolijnerven.bsky.social will showcase the state-of-the-art methods to explore the relatedness between our samples. Join us online on April 16th, 14:00 CET!
Trepanning on a Neolithic French cow.
My writing really does take me to some weird places.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
When you click the "beautify slide" AI feature in Google Slides.
NOT A JOKE
Adults in Ireland's five largest cities are taking an estimated 660,000 cars off the road every day by walking, wheeling or cycling instead of driving, according to new figures
jrnl.ie/6972492
The NYT style guide
I might have missed the point of the movie but I am considerably more likely to go to a rave in Moroccan desert.
(To be clear, it's the sound of my voice and whatever nonsense came out of my mouth I'm embarrassed about - not the research itself)
Spoke on RTÉ News At One on our ancient irish goat research...and let's never speak about it again.
37min mark at www.rte.ie/radio/radio1...
Fair! But it does represent ~half the time goats have actually been on the island, and there have been thousands of years for human meddling to displace or intermix these populations.
Our work on ancient Irish goat was covered in the Irish Times.
www.irishtimes.com/ireland/educ...
I guess, a reminder that domestic animals are part of living heritage, one we have a duty to maintain responsibly - we've been in partnership with these species for a long time.
Just want to recognize again that this represents the PhD work of Judith Findlater, who sadly passed before submission. She truly loved goats, both the ones she was researching at Carrickfergus, and their distant relatives/descendants, the Old Irish Goats.
I'll let @jolijnerven.bsky.social complete a full thread, but the headline results is that we find a genetic connection between a ~3,000 year old Bronze Age goat from Ireland, to the island's only indigenous goat breed today, the endangered Old Irish Goat.
Our paper "Old goats: 3,000 years of genetic connectivity of the domestic goat in Ireland", is now online at the Journal of Archaeological Science! #aDNA
If we can get lumpy skin disease virus gene from parchment, we'd be really cooking.
Can safely way this is the craziest and coolest study I have led. We chart the evolution of sheeppox virus, finding it in the Eurasian steppe ~3700 years ago, and also in a LOT of parchment from medieval Europe (made from a range of animals skins!) #aDNA
Myself and authors 1 & 2 of our SPPV pre-print at Cambridge, where several of the sheeppox-positive parchment are conserved. @louis-lhote.bsky.social and Luisa Sacristán.
(www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...)
Glad to have gotten to share it! Thanks again.
I'm not sure how much archaeological remains there are of sheep in India (leans much more goat today). And there has been limited aDNA recovered from the subcontinent too, chiefly because preservation is rough. But concievably, there could be SPPV in Indian sheep from Bronze Age onwards (or earlier)
*safely say
Huge thanks to @louis-lhote.bsky.social for leading this study and wrangling a lot of metadata, plus many many colabs & libraries/conservators...let's see what survives the peer review process.
Our data suggests that 1) Capripoxviruses diversified in the millenia after domestication of their hosts, 2) sheeppox virus emerged first [we need ancient genomes from the other lineages to confirm this], and 3) key gene inactivation events in sheeppox virus were already in oldest ancient genomes
Can safely way this is the craziest and coolest study I have led. We chart the evolution of sheeppox virus, finding it in the Eurasian steppe ~3700 years ago, and also in a LOT of parchment from medieval Europe (made from a range of animals skins!) #aDNA
We need to stop using industry-friendly PR terms like “age verification” and call it what it is: Digital ID
3,500 years of sheeppox virus evolution inferred from archaeological and codicological genomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.23.707469v1
Congratulations to this amazing scientist!!!
Welcoming University of Vienna's first #APARTUSA fellow: Audrey Lin. 🥳 @undeaddandy.bsky.social
She is an evolutionary molecular biologist who studies animals and viruses. 🦠
Thanks to the APART-USA fellowship program she will be able to bring her project from the @amnh.org in New York to #univie. ⤵️
It's that time again... AaRCTikTalk this Friday!! Anne Runge will talk about microbial/pathogen DNA from prehistoric faunal remains🦠🦴🧬, & Anna Nagel will explore multispecies time calibrations! 🧬🕰️ Hurray! Don't miss it! 🕺 @aarc-community.bsky.social
