Polar bears have traces as back as 50,000 years ago from a place near today's Ireland and it seems that they also have some brown bear ancestry

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Polar bears have traces as back as 50,000 years ago from a place near today's Ireland and it seems that they also have some brown bear ancestry

Polar bears are known to have some things in common with brown bears, but these things were so insignificant that scientists did not truly believe that they may stand for something.

Well, according to a new study led by researchers at the Penn State University, it seems that polar bears actually have their ancestry traced back to brown bears in a region near Ireland. Their ancestry goes as back as 50,000 years ago, just prior to the peak of the last ice age. It seems that this hybridization caused the maternal DNA from brown bears to be introduced into polar bears. Previous studies have show that polar bears may have some relation to brown bears, but none of them showed precisely exactly in what point of time and space the hybridization happened.

The two types of bears are very different from each other, not only in matters of body size, skin and coat color or fur type, but also in matters of tooth structure and in what concerns their behavior: while polar bears are extremely good swimmers, brown bears are more fond of climbing trees and that is the main reason for which they live in mountain forests and wilderness regions from Europe, North American and Asia. Despite these differences, we know that the two species have interbred opportunistically and probably on many occasions during the last 100,000 years,” Beth Shapiro, from the Penn State University, said. Previous studies have shown that this hybridization between the two species might have happen 14,000 years ago, but Shapiro’s team found evidence of that this happening about 50,000 years ago.

Shapiro also commented about how the climate changes affected these two types of bears and it seems that they are further going to be affected, given that we are in a period called the Holocene or Present Interglacial and all the climate changes and the whole issue with the global warming are not helping at all. Furthermore, polar bears are also on the list of protected animals under the Endangered Species Act, and according to Shapiro, the scientists are trying to find a way to protect them better and some DNA samples which attest their ancestry to brown bears is actually very helpful for the researchers. Shapiro concluded by saying that there is still very much to learn about the bears DNA and that further studies are to be made on the issue.

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