Dr. William Marsh

Thanks for inviting us.

It's lovely to be here.

Yeah, thanks, Tristan.

Thanks for having us.

I remember vividly the moment when I saw the initial DNA results.

And I think it was an expletive-ridden response to seeing the fact that, yes, we had, first of all, very, very good DNA preservation from this specimen.

But secondly, that it was a dog.

Because there's been a sort of lot of academic focus on Gough's Cave, the site, over the last sort of 30, 40 years.

And this particular specimen was sampled back in the early 2000s for DNA analysis.

But our methods were so unadvanced at that point, it just didn't work.

And then in 2010, we had some other colleagues of a museum looked at it, looked at the morphology of it and found that it was very, very small compared to other wolves.

And Wade, in a very, very niche text, said, perhaps this is an example of a domestic dog.

But the only true sort of empirical way to know this is through DNA analysis.

And we did a DNA analysis in 2023, 2024.

It's part of my PhD.

And yeah, it's all come from there, really.

Yeah, I first heard about Ancient DNA, the field, from a talk which Selena gave to me in 2019.

And from there, we've been tied in a hip.

You probably want to get rid of me now.

No, never.