Episode 1 Wolfland

WOLF HOWLS

SOULFUL SINGING

WOLF HOWLS

If you watch wolves hunting today,

you'll notice a number of key features.

They certainly work as teams and they'll have grown up with each other,

they'll know each other inside out,

they will notice little changes in the body language

and behaviour, and don't have to make noises as they're hunting.

They will, very quietly, encircle prey, ready to then attack,

or they will even form a circle that another member of the pack

will drive prey into that group.

People who work with gun dogs will know exactly how that works,

you can train dogs to do these things,

and that's because they are innate skills of the wolf.

And many of those are transferable across to human hunting,

so how much early peoples might have

learned from the wolves is obviously a matter of conjecture,

but it's quite likely that they looked to the wolf as a supreme

hunter, and would have really respected them,

and copied some of their better techniques.

WOLF GROWLS

WOLVES HOWL

WOLVES HOWL

We have a very rich resource here in our museum.

What we have is a large collection of bones from Irish caves

that were collected mostly in the early 1900s,

by a group of scientists who were systematically

working their way through Ice Age deposits in those caves,

and, as they documented in their note books, they found hyena bones,

they also found wolf bones,

which probably wasn't as big a surprise,

because with the history of wolves, and the historical records, and so on,

people knew wolves did live here in the past.

What it gives us, then, is a resource

that you could compare individual bones,

like this excavated bone from one of the Irish caves,

the lower jaw of a wolf,

with the lower jaw of a wolf that they'd bought in the early 1900s,

and, look at the curvature of the lower jaw

and look at the depth of it, as well,

to draw distinctions between domesticated dogs and wolves.

CHURCH BELL CHIMES

WOLF HOWLS

There are a large number of superstitions and the use

of wolf parts in medicines throughout Ireland,

and Europe, as well, and we have good records of some of these,

for example, wolf tooth was used as a huge charm,

or protection against evil, and also protection against illness,

and there almost a mini-trade in wolf teeth coming from Ireland,

going to England, at various stages throughout the 1600s and 1500s.

A whole series of books from the Bristol Port

have survived from 1492, and these books record the trade from Ireland

of a large number of products and shipping across the Irish Sea.

Included in this trade, were a remarkable series of records

of wolf skins being exported from Ireland.

These were quite expensive items in the record itself,

some of the most expensive skins being exported from Ireland,

and this tells us there was the hunting of wolves

for commercial gain in Ireland,

but it also tells us that there was a huge wolf population still

surviving in Ireland right up until the 1600s.

WOLF HOWLS

-VOICE-OVER:

-I heard tell of a traveller recently,

making his way from Roonith to Drummin.

At Cregganbun, believing he had travelled the most dangerous

part of the journey, he gave his dagger and only weapon to a man

returning to the East, only to be killed by a wolf further along the way.

WOLVES BARK

WOLF WHIMPERS

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd