Most dramatically, a cave bear skull was perched on a stone slab in the center of one chamber, placed deliberately by some long-gone cave inhabitant with opposable thumbs. The artists weren't the cave's only occupants: the floor is covered with 150 cave bear skeletons, and its soft clay still holds paw prints as well as indentations where bears apparently slept. The walls of France's Chauvet cave, occupied 32,000 years ago, are painted with lions, hyenas and bears-perhaps the oldest paintings in the world. Modern humans arrived in Europe about 40,000 years ago and were soon aware of the bears. The idea was popularized by Jean Auel's 1980 novel, The Clan of the Cave Bear, but has since been rejected by researchers. For a time, archaeologists thought Neanderthals worshiped the bears, or even shared caves with them. Initially they shared the continent with Neanderthals. Were humans prey for the bears, or predators? Were bears objects of worship or fear?Ĭave bears evolved in Europe more than 100,000 years ago. ![]() But the relationship between humans and cave bears has been mysterious. Prehistoric humans painted images of the animals on cave walls and carved their likeness in fragments of mammoth tusk. Cave bears had wider heads than today's bears, and powerful shoulders and forelimbs. Males weighed up to 1,500 pounds, 50 percent more than the largest modern grizzlies. "Caves are good places to preserve bones, and cave bears had the good sense to die there," Bocherens says.Īlong with mammoths, lions and woolly rhinos, cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) were once among Europe's most impressive creatures. An abundance of bear bones has been found from Spain to Romania in caves where the animals once hibernated. People have been excavating cave bear remains for hundreds of years-in the Middle Ages, the massive skulls were attributed to dragons-but the past decade has seen a burst of discoveries about how the bears lived and why they went extinct. The method may be harsh, but the yield is precious-the chemical biography of a cave bear.īocherens, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tübingen, Germany, is in the vanguard of research on the bear, a European species that died out 25,000 years ago. Hervé Bocherens says his colleagues find his research methods a little "crude." He dissolves 30,000-year-old animal bones in hydrochloric acid strong enough to burn through metal, soaks the bone solution in lye, cooks it at about 200 degrees Fahrenheit and freeze-dries it until what's left is a speck of powder weighing less than one one-hundredth of an ounce.
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