Not to mention three fantastic keynote speakers!

Thanks to the AEA @envarch.bsky.social for selecting us to host it! We've worked hard to plan a great conference (with optional features of a conference dinner curling session, and a field trip to see the archaeology of the Eden Valley and rewilding!).

Poor little cat, it sounds like she should pick up soon with the antibiotics and painkillers, and I am sure that she will be roaming around in no time!

What a sad looking little thing! Hope she recovers quickly!

That's really helpful! Thanks Flint!

I liked the concept of a Bring your Own Boar party! It made me think of the Iron age Llanmaes middens where you had to bring along your Right Forelimb of a pig to the celebration.

There are some great groups of people trying to do just that! A few years ago I enjoyed volunteering with the Cantabrian Brown Bear society planting fruit trees to provide food for the endangered bear population in the region

By supporting the creation of new habitats, and by greeting better connectivity between existing populations we can help to limit the impacts of environmental change and human activity on these populations.

It's interesting to think of how we can use this to help threatened species today. In Europe Brown bears are threatened by environmental change affecting their habitats, as well as humans encroaching on their territory, mirroring what happened to the cave bears.

So what can we say about their extinction? Well, when the last ice age happened, even though the bears were adaptable in what they could eat, the scale of environmental change affecting food availability, combined with competition for resources with humans likely played a role.

In fact, European cave bears appeared to adapt well to consuming plants that were available locally, showing they were fairly adaptable.

Results suggested that they ate a wide variety of plants deriving from across the landscape, suggesting some flexibility what they were eating from different ecological zones. When compared to other European bears they had some of the largest ranges in values of populations analysed to date.

Within Level 3 the site of Šalitrena Pećina a cave bear den was found, with remains dating back around 40,000 years. We used stable isotope analysis to explore what these individuals ate.

The extinction of the cave bears is widely explored, particularly how they coped with changing environments, adapting to new conditions, predation by humans and competition for resources. Cave bear diet is a key part of this debate.

Fun fact: My Fitbit registered all of my clapping as footsteps... I'd logged 8,000 by the time I'd left the ceremony...