Extra: Behind The Scenes of The Lost Bridge
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What should listeners know before diving into the behind‑the‑scenes discussion of The Lost Bridge?
Future Proof Extra with Jonathan McRae. Proudly supported by Research Ireland on Newstalk.
Hello and welcome to Future Proof Extra. I'm Jonathan McRae. Just a heads up, before you even start listening to this, if you haven't listened to the documentary, a lot of this isn't going to make sense because we're going to deconstruct everything that we talked about in the documentary. So listen to that first. It's called The Lost Bridge. It's in your podcast feed. But if you have listened to it, you're in the right place. Okay, so producer Aidan McKelvie joins me in studio. We have had quite the week.
We have had quite the week. The listener doesn't know we were just, I was just getting cranky there just before we went online. But that's just, that's kind of indicative of how the week has just been like, now we need to do this. And you didn't tell me how to do this because we've been scrambling to get this. I
love that. The idea that that is you cranky is very heartwarming. That's the mildest cranky I've ever seen. Yeah, so to give you a little bit of context, And as you heard in the documentary, in June, we went to join Genevieve von Petzinger after a phone call on the show. In April, she said, we're going to go to the west of Ireland to kind of look for cave art because we have this AI system that maybe looked at where glaciers may not have been after all. And we're going to have a look there. And so I was like, sure. I mean, it sounded like a fishing expedition to me at the time. So I was kind of like, sure. And I was thinking, I'm not doing that much this summer. So, OK, fine. get a call from Genevieve. And Genevieve is like, you should get down here.
And that was really exciting. She rings Aidan, Aidan rings me. And so I bundle into the car and I drive down to Claire's And I meet the team. I didn't realize there were going to be so many of them there. And we kind of gear up and we head into the cave. And like, it's surprisingly close to civilization. I could have sort of imagined, in my mind, I wanted to be like, you know, trekking through forests and, you know, took his, you know, like a...
Finally, days after of tracking, we finally found water.
I wanted that sort of a vibe, but it's actually very convenient to reach this cave. And we went in and we have, you know, this really interesting group of Genevieve, very enthusiastic Canadian. We have this sort of cautious and a little bit skeptical Dutch Lady Barbara. And then we have George, who's like big into, you know, he's been doing this for years and years and he's just big into the the whole history and everything. And so it gets very enthusiastic. So there's kind of a really interesting mix of people. And so we go into the cave, as you hear, and I was like, what the hell is this? But they were really excited. So the first thing you see, like, is, like, there's nothing. It's like, it's just, like, almost like, you know when you see people put their handprints in cement?
It was like that. And I was like, how do you know that's old? And how do you, like... This doesn't seem like anything at all. And then they start showing you these sort of waves in the moon milk, as they call it. And so you have these different colors and you can see sort of the sort of colors tell you how old these sort of finger flutings are.
Would you be an expert at that now if you walked into some random cave? Because I suppose that's like expertise is like that where you expect it to be It's the same as in the last documentary, I remember we were looking through a telescope at Jupiter. And in your mind, when you think about what it's going to look like, you're like, it's going to be huge in
the
frame, but it's actually quite small.
Well, I mean, it's because the telescope wasn't very
strong.
How did the team decide to travel to the west of Ireland and what was the original plan?
No, but even like I've done that once before at like the top of a mountain in New Zealand. And it's funny, it's just very far away. And like, it's never that big, but it kind of, you have an expectation of it from like seeing graphics and stuff. And it's more about when you're there, it's like, oh, it's actually the real thing I'm seeing.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What should listeners know before diving into the behind‑the‑scenes discussion of The Lost Bridge?
0:01–3:35
2
How did the team decide to travel to the west of Ireland and what was the original plan?
3:35–7:26
3
What did the explorers discover inside the cave and how did they identify the finger‑fluting markings?
7:26–12:56
4
Why might the ancient markings be communication rather than art, and what does that imply about early humans?
12:56–18:07
5
How did the documentary’s release schedule force the team to produce the film in just three days?
18:07–21:25
6
What role did music play in the final documentary and how did the creators experiment with a Paleolithic‑style soundtrack?
21:25–23:03
7
What audience questions and scientific debates (e.g., dating of artefacts, dark‑matter claims) surfaced after the episode aired?
23:03–23:38
8
How did the hosts wrap up the episode and where can listeners find more about The Lost Bridge?
23:38–23:55