Do Polar Bears Growl with an Irish Brogue?

No! Don't tell me I'm Irish!

Polar bears have Irish ancestry, suggests DNA study

Twisted lines of ancestry seem to have intertwined two very different species: the water-loving polar bear and the forest-loving Irish brown bear. Despite being so different, the two seem to have found love: Meeting and breeding at least once during the last 120,000 years, the two species gave rise to the polar bears we know today.

"The Irish genetic sequences are much closer to the modern polar bear," said study researcher Daniel Bradley, of Trinity College Dublin. "As the climate has changed, what we are seeing is the tracking of that climatic change in the sequences in the bears." [Real or Fake? 8 Bizarre Hybrid Animals]

The researchers started by analyzing the DNA of brown bears from Ireland and comparing it with that of ancient and modern polar bears. They used samples from bear skeletons found in Irish and British caves. The oldest skeletons were 120,000 years old and the youngest were at least 3,000 years old, the latter having died shortly before the bears went extinct in the area.

Too much Jameson's?

It's pretty clear from genetic studies and the ability of Brown and Polar Bears to hybridize, that Polar Bears are likely a fairly recent (as geological things go) branch off the Brown Bear line.  An earlier study suggest that Polar Bears evolved from Brown Bears about 150,000 years ago, or fairly late in the Pleistocene epoch, the ice ages that started 2.59 million years ago, and probably continue to the present (Technically we live in the Holocene epoch, but that's likely just the warm high on one of the humps of a continuing series of cold cycles).  Having large portions of the earth frozen certainly selected for species adapted for the cold

So are Polar Bears really Irish?  For now, until somebody finds Brown Bear fossils even closer genetically to the Polar Bears somewhere else.