The Bear and Cavebear in Fact, Myth and Legend

Recent additions, changes and updates to Don's Maps
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 Abel Tasman Track in New Zealand

 Aboriginal Art of the Kimberleys
 Aboriginal art on the Northern Tablelands of NSW
 Aborigines of Australia
 Abri Pataud Tools
 Abri de Raymonden
 Access to Mihi Gorge and to Salisbury Waters below the junction with Mihi Creek
 Achenheim - a middle palaeolithic site on loess
 Acheulian and Saint Acheul
 Adorant - Worshipper
 Afontova Gora
 Altamira Cave Paintings
 Amelana's Cave - Third Cave of the Zelandonii That Watches Over the Most Ancient
Sacred Site
 Ancient Egyptian Culture, Mummies, Statues, Burial Practices and Artefacts 7
 Ancient Egyptian culture during the 18th Dynasty
 Ancient Egyptian culture from the 11th Dynasty to the end of the 17th Dynasty
 Ancient Egyptian culture from the 19th Dynasty to the end of the 20th Dynasty
 Ancient Mesopotamia
 Animals of Mungo
 Apsley and Green Gully Creek
 Archaeological Sites on the Don River
 Archeology for Jean Auel fans
 Artefacts of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest
 Atapuerca
 Atlatls, Spear Throwers, and Woomeras
 Aurignacian - La Grotte d'Aurignac
 Australia's settlement by the Aborigines
 Australopithecus aethiopicus
 Australopithecus africanus
 Australopithecus robustus - Paranthropus robustus
 Australopithecus sediba
 Avdeevo - Tools from the stone age
 Avdeevo - a Paleolithic site with strong links to Kostenki
 Axe Quarry
 Babylon and the Ishtar Gate
 Badegoule
 Baguettes demi-rondes
 Baile Herculane
 Bara Bahau Cave - La Grotte de Bara Bahau - Ice Age Cave Art
 Batavia - the journey, the shipwreck and the massacre
 Batavia - the ship
 Battle of Megiddo - Ancient Egyptian culture
 Baume-Latrone
 Beach Walking in Australia
 Bear and cavebear in fact, myth and legend
 Bedeilhac Cave - Grotte de Bedeilhac
 Berekhat Ram Venus
 Bernifal Cave - Grotte de Bernifal
 Bird Feather Cloak of Captain James Cook
 Blombos Cave
 Bohunician in Moravia
 Bornholm rock engravings
 Boundary Creek to Grassy Creek - World Heritage Walk
 Brady Creek and the nearby galleries - an Aboriginal Rock Art site in Northern
Queensland
 Brassempouy Venus - Ayla from the EC series
 Breitenbach Venus
 British Mousterian and earlier tools and sites
 Brno Burial of a Shaman
 Bronze Age Sky Disc
 Brown Ivory Figurine, or Abrachiale, a venus of fossilised ivory from Balzi Rossi
 Building a Kayak
 Building good looking stone walls
 Burial Mounds in Denmark
 Bushwalking, Hiking and Tramping in New Zealand
 Bushwalking in Australia
 Bust, one of the Grimaldi Venuses
 Buxu Cave, Cueva del Buxu, Spain
 Bâtons Percés
 Canoe designs of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest
 Canoes of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest
 Carnarvon Gorge, in the spectacular and rugged ranges of Queensland's central
highlands
 Carnarvon Gorge - an Aboriginal Rock Stencil Art site, with engravings of vulvas,
emu and kangaroo tracks
 Carte de la vallée des chevaux
 Carte des Sharamudoi
 Cartes dessinées à l’ordinateur
 Cassegros Tools
 Casserole (archaeological site)Tools
 Castel-Merle - Vallon des Roches
 Causes of the end of the last Ice Age
 Cave Lion
 Cave Paintings - Location Maps and Themes
 Caverne du Clan de l'Ours
 Caves and Rock Art Sites - Visits
 Caves and Rock Shelters on the North coast of Spain
 Caves and Rock Shelters with Wall Paintings and Engravings
 Caves of the Cantabria region, northern Spain
 Cedar Bentwood Chests of the First Nations of the Pacific North West
 Central European Sites
 Chandler River - Bushwalking and Hiking
 Chandler River - Lower reaches, bushwalking and hiking
 Chapelle-aux-Saints - the Neanderthal / Neandertal skeleton
 Chauvet Cave
 Chiozza Venus from Italy
 Châtelperronian Sites
 Clan Cave - Shanidar Cave in Iraq
 Clan of the Cave Bear Local map
 Clan of the Cave Bear Travel Map - English
 Clan of the Cave Bear Travel Map - French
 Clickable map of the Shelters of Stone area in the Land of Painted Caves, Vezere
Valley
 Clothing, Masks and Weaving of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest
 Coa Valley
 Columbian Mammoths and Bison Petroglyphs from Utah
 Combarelles - Les Combarelles in the Dordogne
 Combe-Capelle, a Neanderthal site in Southern France
 Combe-Capelle Tools
 Combe Grenal - a Neanderthal site in the Dordogne valley, France
 Combe Grenal Tools
 Combe Saunière
 Cooking Clan Style
 Coptic and Islamic textiles and other art works from Egypt and neighbouring areas
 Corbiac Tools
 Cougnac Caves - Grottes de Cougnac
 Crimean Peninsula - Sudak, the Clan fishing site
 Cro-Magnon Shelter
 Cueva Covalanas in Cantabria, Spain
 Cueva de El Mirón in Cantabria, Spain
 Cueva del Pindal
 Cuina Turcului - a rock shelter in the Iron Gates gorges of the Danube
 Cussac Cave - Grotte de Cussac
 Cyclades Art
 Cycling down the Danube
 Cycling from Amsterdam to Copenhagen
 Dangars Falls and Salisbury Waters
 Dangars Gorge
 Danube Journey from the delta to the source
 Decorative objects from the Stone Age
 De l'embouchure du Danube à première neige d'après le Grand Voyage
 De la première neige aux mammouths d'après le Grand Voyage
 Denisova
 Deux-Ouvertures Grotte, Ardeche
 Development of art in humans
 Did Megafauna die from hunting or climate change?
 Dinosaurs and other ancient animals
 Discs from the Stone Age
 Dolni Vestonice Home Page
 Dolni Vestonice Jewellery, Pottery, Tools and other artifacts
 Dolni Vestonice Venus figures
 Dolni Vestonice and Pavlov burials, including the triple burial
 Dolni Vestonice and Pavlov sites
 Dolni Vestonice and the Three Sisters - photographs of the area
 Don River south and north of Kostenki
 Dordogne - Photographs of the area
 Dots and Lines in Palaeolithic Cave Paintings
 Double Venus
 Drawing maps on the computer
 Earth's Children Inconsistencies
 Egypt2
 Egyptian Mummies, Statues, Burial Practices and Artefacts index
 El Castillo Cave
 Faurelie Tools
 Ferrassie Tools
 First Nations of the Pacific Northwest - Totem Poles
 Flageolet Tools
 Font de Gaume - Cave Paintings from the Ice Ages
 Footwear from the Stone Age
 Forgeries, Hoaxes and Curiosities
 Fort de Tayac (Roc de Tayac) - a refuge from war during the Middle Ages
 Fossilised Human Footprints in Australia
 Fourneau du Diable
 Frasassi Venus
 From the Mountains to the Sea - Point Lookout, Grass Tree Ridge and the Bellinger
River
 Fumane Cave Neanderthal painted shell
 Gagarino Venus Figures
 Gargas - Cave Art of the Grotte de Gargas
 Gaura Chindiei - a limestone cave at the first Iron Gate of the Danube
 Genyornis, an extinct giant bird from the Australian Ice Age
 Geology for EC fans
 Giovanni Caselli
 Golden Thread - formerly used as a herbal contraceptive and abortifacient
 Golubac - a fortified medieval town on the Danube
 Gonnersdorf and Andernach - Martinsberg
 Gontsy mammoth bone hut site
 Grassy Creek to Mulligans Hut - World Heritage Walk
 Grotte-abri de La Magdeleine des Albis
 Grotte Mandrin - first Homo sapiens in Europe?
 Grotte Vaufrey
 Grotte d'Enlène
 Grotte de Commarque
 Grotte de Gabillou, Grotte de Las Agnelas
 Grotte de Pair-non-Pair
 Grotte de Queylou
 Grotte de la Foret
 Grotte de la Marche
 Grotte de la Mouthe - a decorated cave from the Upper Paleolithic
 Grotte de la Vache in the Pyrenees was home for the artists of Niaux Cave
 Grotte de la Vache near Niaux - A scientific paper on its fauna and occupation by
humans during the ice age
 Grotte des Eyzies / Grotte Richard
 Grotte des Trois-Frères
 Grotte du Grand Roc
 Grottes du Pape, Brassempouy
 Grub-Kranawetberg Gravettian site
 Gruta da Aroeira - Homo heidelbergensis
 Guardian Place, Yam Camp, Shepherd Creek Secret Place, and Emu Dreaming
Galleries - Aboriginal Rock Art sites in Northern Queensland
 Gudenushöhle in Lower Austria
 Hajducka Vodenica - a Mesolithic Iron Gates site
 Hamburgian site in the Netherlands - Perdeck Collection
 Harpoons from the Paleolithic
 Heaphy Track in New Zealand
 Heat Treatment of microcrystalline quartz
 Heidenschmiede
 Hermaphrodite Venus from Balzi Rossi
 History and Development of Stone Tools
 Hitchcock Family History
 Hominid overview
 Hominids and hominins
 Hominid sites in Africa and nearby regions
 Hominid sites in Europe and nearby regions
 Homo Erectus - Homo Sapiens skull found in China
 Homo Habilis
 Homo Naledi
 Homo Rudolfensis
 Homo erectus, Java Man, Engraving on a shell
 Homo erectus - Homo ergaster
 Homo erectus - the Dmanisi Site
 Homo floresiensis - ancestor discovered
 Homo floresiensis - the most recent living human relative
 Homo heidelbergensis
 Homo luzonensis
 Ice Age Animals
 Ice Age Animals, Plants, People and Geology
 Ice Age Babies from the Krems-Wachtberg site
 Ice Age Hunters in Northern Europe
 Ice Age Maps showing the extent of the ice sheets
 Ice Age hunters become farmers: Schleswig-Holstein on the way to the Neolithic
 Index of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest Coast
 Iron Gates - Location of the Sharamudoi
 Iron Gates Animals
 Iron Gates of the Danube - Per's Photos
 Isturitz, Oxocelhaya and Erberua Caves, where many prehistoric flutes were found
 Isturitz Tools
 Jean Auel - Interviews and memories
 Jebel Irhoud Homo sapiens
 Jerimalai Cave in East Timor
 Kapova Cave
 Kebara Cave, a Middle Paleolithic Aurignacian and Mousterian site
 Kimberley Points - superbly made tools from the north of Australia
 Kostenki - Borshevo, Костенки - Борщево region on the Don River, Russia
 Krasnii lar / Krasnyy Yar Venus
 Kulna Cave Neanderthal site
 L'Abri Poisson and La Gorge d'Enfer
 L'Abri du Cap Blanc - a frieze of prehistoric sculptures
 L'abri du Renne de Belcayre in the Dordogne
 La Cotte de St Brelade, Jersey
 La Ferrassie - Neanderthal rock shelter
 La Gravette, the type site for the Gravettian
 La Grotte de Jolias - a Magdalenian site at Prignac-et-Marcamps, France
 La Grotte du Sorcier - la Grotte du Roc Saint-Cirq
 La Madeleine - a rock shelter in the Dordogne with exquisite art objects from the
Magdalenian
 La MadeleineTools
 La Micoque - a Neanderthal site in the Dordogne dating from 400 000 BP to 130 000
BP
 La Micoque Tools
 La Quina - a Neanderthal site with thick asymmetric tools
 Lagar Velho - the Hybrid Child from Portugal
 Lake Mungo is the site of the oldest human remains in Australia
 Lalinde / Gönnersdorf Figurines and Engravings
 La rencontre avec les S'Armunaï
 Lascaux Cave - Grotte de Lascaux
 Lascaux Cave - Rope artefact
 Laugerie Basse
 Laugerie Haute
 Laugerie Haute Tools
 Laura River bed, near the Bridge - an Aboriginal Rock Art site in Northern
Queensland
 Laura Rock Art
 Laura Rock Art - Wallaroo Gallery
 Le Morin
 Le Moustier - a Neanderthal site in the Dordogne, France
 Le Moustier Tools
 Le Piage
 Le Regourdou - one of the most important Neanderthal sites in France
 Le Ruth and Le Cellier in the Dordogne
 Lene Hara Cave in East Timor
 Lepenski Vir - a Mesolithic site on the Iron Gates Gorge of the Danube
 Les Jamblancs
 Les chasseurs de mammouths
 Lespugue Venus is a 25 000 years old ivory figurine of a nude female figure
 Lightest alcohol stove for hiking - and the easiest to make!
 Lightweight Bushwalking / Hiking Gear which you can make yourself
 Lightweight Tents
 Lightweight and Warm Sleeping Bags and Quilts
 Line drawings - using Photoshop to clean up photographs of line drawings
 Lion Man from Ulm
 Liujiang cranium, more than 40 000 years old, of a modern Homo sapiens
 Lonetal Sites, including Aurignacian sites in the Swabian Alb near the city of Ulm
 Longbow replica
 Lucy's baby
 Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis
 Makapansgat pebble
 Making Fire
 Making Flint Tools
 Mal'ta - Buret' venuses and culture in Siberia
 Mammoth Hunters Local Map
 Mammoths, Elephants and the Wooly Rhinoceros
 Mamontovaya Kurya - human occupation nearly 40 000 years ago in the Russian
Arctic
 Manis Mastodon
 Maori Forts - Pa
 Map of Ayla's travels from the Clan Cave to the Zelandonii on one page, Books 1 to 5
 Map of Land of Painted Caves by Jean M. Auel - Journeys
 Map of Sharamudoi Local Area for EC fans
 Map of Zelandonii Extended Area from Land of Painted Caves
 Map of the Iron Gates for Archeology students and teachers
 Map of the Iron Gates for Jean M. Auel Fans
 Map of the Valley of Horses - Local Map for EC fans
 Map of the Vezere Valley for Archeology Teachers and Students
 Map of the Wurm and Riss Glaciation
 Map of the Zelandonii Territory Local Area for EC fans, books 5 and 6
 Maps of the Iron Gates - the Journeys to the Sharamudoi for EC fans and the Iron
Gates for students and teachers of Archeology
 Marsoulas - La Grotte de Marsoulas, ice age art
 Mas d'Azil Cave - La Grotte du Mas d'Azil
 Mask, or the Face, or the Figure, from Balzi Rossi
 Mastodons and related early elephants
 Meadowcroft Rockshelter, a pre-Clovis site
 Mesolithic sites in northern Europe
 Mezhyrich / Межиріч - Mammoth Camp
 Mihi Gorge
 Milovice
 Minnie Water to Diggers Camp Beach Walk
 Mizyn, Мізин - Wolf Camp
 Mladecske Caves and other early Palaeolithic sites in the Czech Republic
 Moli del Salt - first depiction of Palaeolithic dwellings
 Monte Buciero Rock Shelters - on the Cantabrian coast, Spain
 Moravany Venus
 Mortuary Poles and Graves of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest
 Moscerini
 Moulin du Roc Tools
 Mount Kaputar, NSW
 Mount Kosciuszko in the Snowy Mountains of Australia
 Mousterian (Neanderthal) Sites
 Mousterian of Eastern Europe
 Mt Grattai and Gins Mountain
 Mt Yarrowyck
 Mtoto - child burial in East Africa of Homo sapiens
 Mulligans Hut World Heritage Walk, Gibraltar Range - Washpool National Park
 Mulligans Hut to Boundary Creek - World Heritage Walk
 Mungo - Recent Bones
 Mungo - Walls of China
 Mungo Burrowing Bettong
 Mungo Feral Animals
 Mungo Footprints
 Mungo Fossils
 Mungo Giant Kangaroo
 Mungo Giant Wombat
 Mungo Man
 Mungo Plants
 Mungo Swamp Cow
 Musical Instruments
 Namibia - Rock paintings from Namibia in Africa
 Naracoorte Caves
 Neandertal models
 Neanderthal Amud 1, Israel
 Neanderthal Art
 Neanderthal Symbolism
 Neanderthal child from Wezmeh Cave
 Neanderthals of Schleswig-Holstein
 Nebra Venus - Die Venus von Nebra
 Negroid Head Venus from Balzi Rossi
 Neo-Assyrian
 Neolithic and later Sites
 Nets and skis from ancient times
 Niaux - Grotte de Niaux Cave Art and History
 Niaux - Grotte de Niaux Description and History
 Niaux Cave index
 Niaux Cave maps, plans and aerial photos
 Norwegian Rock Art - Alta Fjord
 Nubia and the Kingdom of Kush
 Numeracy in prehistoric art and artefacts
 Nun Venus, or the Flattened Figure
 Nyayanga Butchery Site in Kenya
 Oberkassel Double Burial
 Old Iron Gates Images
 Oldest Jewellery
 Oreopithecus - an ancient ape
 Original Neanderthal skeleton from the Neander Valley
 Other Mousterian (Neanderthal) Sites and Artefacts
 Other Mungo Animals
 Otzi - Ötzi the Iceman
 Overview of Cave Paintings and Sculptures
 Overview of the Iron Gates
 Padina
 Page Redirection to venus page
 Paisley Caves complex - when did people first reach North America?
 Palaeolithic / Paleolithic European, Russian and Australian Archaeology / Archeology
Sites
 Palaeolithic Fibres and Textiles
 Palaeolithic Venus figures - their purpose
 Paleolithic of the USSR
 Parabita Venus - two venuses from Parabita, Italy
 Paranthropus boisei - Nutcracker man
 Pareidolia
 Partizanska Jama, Partisan Cave in Slovenia
 Pasiega Cave
 Pech-de-l'Aze
 Pech Merle
 Pestera Coliboaia - Coliboaia Cave Rock Art
 Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology
 Peyrugues Tools
 Phallus in Stone Age Art
 Photography in Museums
 Photoshop Basics - a beginner's guide
 Pine Tree Creek, Tied Up Wrist and Wallaroo Galleries - Aboriginal Rock Art sites in
Northern Queensland
 Placard Cave - Grotte du Placard - Grotte de Rochebertier
 Plains of Passage - Clickable Map of the Danube
 Poire Venus
 Potlatch - First Nations of the Pacific Northwest
 Privacy Policy
 Proconsul africanus
 Qesem Cave
 Quinkan Corner, the Rock Wallaby Gallery, and Tent Shelter Gallery - Aboriginal
Rock Art sites in Northern Queensland
 Raising the Mammoth
 Raven
 Recent Stories from the Don River
 Recent additions, changes and updates to Don's Maps
 Red Lady Galleries near Laura - an Aboriginal Rock Art site in Northern Queensland
 Red Ochre Venus or Dame ocree, is a venus of mammoth ivory from Balzi Rossi
covered with red ochre
 Reflection Rock and Roque Saint-Christophe
 Reindeer People
 Reindeer People of today
 Roc-de-Cave
 Roc aux Sorciers
 Roc de Cazelle
 Roc de Combe Tools
 Roc de Marcamps and la grotte des Fées
 Roc de Sers
 Rock Engravings of Gobustan
 Rogalik Venus Figures
 Rondelles from the Stone Age
 Rossosh burial mounds
 Rouffignac Cave - La Grotte de Rouffignac, ice age art
 Sacred Root
 Safe Water for Hiking
 Saint-Front Cave
 Saint Césaire Neanderthal skeleton
 Salle Piette
 Sandy Creek near Laura - an Aboriginal Rock Art site in Northern Queensland
 Sarum Lookout, Salisbury Waters and McDirtys Lookout
 Savignano Venus
 Schela Cladovei
 Schoningen spears and throwing sticks
 Sewing Hiking Equipment
 Shanidar, Solecki, and Mahmoud Khudir
 Shanidar Cave
 Sipka Cave - a Neanderthal site
 Sitemap
 Sites of Geissenklosterle, Hohle Fels, and Middle Paleolithic sites in the Swabian Alb
near the city of Ulm
 Small Lion Man from Hohle Fels
 Solutrean - the peak of stone tools workmanship
 Solvieux - a large open-air site near Gabillou in the l'Isle basin.
 Sound of a flute
 South African Rock paintings in the Cedar Mountains
 Spy Neanderthal
 Stone Lamps of the Palaeolithic
 Sulawesi ancient rock art
 Sungaea in the EC series
 Sungir / Sunghir
 Sveduv Stul Neanderthal site
 Szeletian culture - a development of the Mousterian, contemporaneous with the
Aurignacian.
 Tan-Tan Venus
 Territoire des Zelandoni
 Three year old Neanderthal child of Roc de Marsal, one of the oldest burials of the
Perigord
 Thunderbolt's Lookout
 Tools, Shells and Bones from Lake Mungo in Australia
 Tools from the stone age
 Tools from the stone age - index
 Tools from the stone age of Germany
 Trasimeno Venus
 Travers - Sabine Circuit, Nelson Lakes, New Zealand
 Travers Sabine Circuit in New Zealand - Angelus Hut to John Tait Hut
 Travers Sabine Circuit in New Zealand - Blue Lake to Lake Rotoroa
 Travers Sabine Circuit in New Zealand - John Tait Hut to West Sabine Hut over the
Travers Saddle
 Travers Sabine Circuit in New Zealand - St Arnaud, Bushline and Angelus Huts
 Travers Sabine Circuit in New Zealand - West Sabine Hut to Blue Lake
 Trou Magrite Venus
 Tuc d'Audoubert
 Two Headed Woman, one of the Grimaldi Venuses
 Undescribed Venus from Balzi Rossi
 Venus Impudique
 Venus Timeline
 Venus el Rombo, or Venus de Losange, (the diamond or rhomboid shaped venus)
from Grimaldi
 Venuses of Mainz
 Venuses of Neuchatel - Monruz
 Venus figure from Las Caldas
 Venus figure from le Cellier
 Venus figures from Fontales
 Venus figures from Petersfels
 Venus figures from Russia, Ukraine and sites East of the Donau mouth
 Venus figures from Western Europe
 Venus figures from Wilczyce 10
 Venus figures from the Kostenki - Borshevo region on the Don River
 Venus figures from the Stone Age
 Venus figures from the Stone Age
 Venus from Waldstetten
 Venus of Abri Pataud, and the archeological site of Abri Pataud at Les Eyzies
 Venus of Bataille / Sireuil
 Venus of Courbet / Bruniquel / Montastruc
 Venus of Craiova
 Venus of Die Rote von Mauern - the Red Venus from the Weinberghöhlen near
Mauern
 Venus of Die Rote von Mauern - the Red Venus from the Weinberghöhlen near
Mauern
 Venus of El Pendo Cave (Santander)
 Venus of Galgenberg- Fanny
 Venus of Hohle Fels
 Venus of Kesslerloch
 Venus of Khotylevo
 Venus of Laugerie Basse - the Supplicant
 Venus of Laussel - La Femme a la Corne
 Venus of Macomer
 Venus of Menton, one of the Grimaldi Venuses
 Venus of Milandes, from Castelnaud-la-Chapelle, Dordogne
 Venus of Monpazier, carved in limonite
 Venus of Montecompatri
 Venus of Oblazowa
 Venus of Pekarna
 Venus of Polichinelle, carved in green steatite
 Venus of Péchialet
 Venus of Renancourt
 Venus of Sireuil, Roc de Cazelle, Dordogne
 Venus of Terme-Pialat, Dordogne
 Venus of Tursac, a figurine of translucent calcite
 Venus of Willendorf
 Venus of Zaraysk / Зарайск Венера, part of the Kostenki-Willendorf culture
 Venus of l'abri d'Enval
 Venus with Goitre
 Vero Florida - Ice Age Mammoth carving
 Vezere Valley clickable map
 Viking Ships of Roskilde
 Villars Cave - Grotte de Villars
 Villepin
 Vlasac
 Vogelherd Cave, Vogelherdhöhlen
 Vulva in Stone Age Art
 Wangapeka Track in New Zealand
 Warratyi Rock Shelter
 Water Quality
 Waterproofing a pack quickly and easily
 Whinney
 Willow Pool - Jondalar and Ayla's Spring
 Winnemucca Petroglyphs: Oldest Rock Art in North America
 Wollomombi and Chandler Falls walking and climbing
 Woman with the perforated neck
 Wonderwerk Cave - stone tools made by Homo habilis
 Zaraysk / Зарайск
Back to Don's Maps
The bear and cavebear in fact, myth and

legend
A superb Cave Bear restoration.
Photo: Sergiodlarosa
Permission: GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or later
Cave Bear skeleton in the Vienna Natural

History Museum.
Note the ridge down the top centre of the

skull which is there to attach the large
muscles of the jaws and the neck. It was a
powerful animal, and could eat both animal
and vegetable materials, though it was
apparently mostly vegetarian.
Photo: Don Hitchock 2008

Text: Adapted from Wikipedia
Source: apparently original, Vienna Natural
History Museum
The skeleton on display at the
Vienna Natural History
museum included a baby
cavebear as well as a juvenile.
The cave bear had a very

broad, domed skull with a
steep forehead. Its stout body
had long thighs, massive
shins and in-turning feet,
making it similar in skeletal
structure to the brown bear.
Cave bears were comparable
in size to the largest modern
day bears. The average weight for males was 400-500 kilograms (880-1102 pounds), while
females weighed 225–250 kg (496-551 lbs).[4] Of cave bear skeletons in museums, 90% are
male due to a misconception that the female skeletons were merely "dwarfs". Cave bears grew
larger during glaciations and smaller during interglacials, probably to adjust heat loss rate.

Source: apparently original, Vienna Natural History Museum
Cave bear juvenile.
Cave bears of the last ice age

lacked the usual 2-3
premolars present in other
bears; to compensate, the last
molar is very elongated, with
supplementary cusps. The
humerus of the cave bear was
similar in size to that of the
polar bear, as were the femora
of females. The femora of
male cave bears, however,
bore more similarities in size
to those of kodiak bears.

Cave bear juvenile.
There is some evidence that

the cave bear only used caves
for hibernation and was not
inclined to use other
locations, such as thickets, for
this purpose, in contrast to the
more versatile Brown Bear.
This specialized hibernation
behavior would have caused a
high winter mortality rate for
Cave Bears that failed to find
available caves.
Therefore, as human populations slowly increased, the Cave Bear faced a shrinking pool of
suitable caves, and slowly faded away to extinction, as both Neanderthals and anatomically
modern humans sought out caves as living quarters, depriving the cave bear of vital habitat.
This hypothesis is being researched at this time.

A cave bear baby.
Cave bears (Ursus spelaeus)

probably gave birth to cubs
during dormancy. Bear cubs
lactated their mothers during
their first and second winters,
but were fed solid food
together with lactation during
their first summer.

Text: Adapted from Liden et al. (1985)
Recreation of a cave
bear.
I suspect this is meant

to depict the cave bear
in summer, with shorter
hair than most other
restorations.
Photo: Don Hitchcock

2014
Source: Original on
display at Le Musée
National de Préhistoire,
Les Eyzies-de-Tayac
Many of the photographs below and much of the text are from the excellent book by Ivar
Lissner, translated into English by J. Maxwell Brownjohn called 'Man, God and Magic',
published in 1961.
In 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, he wanted to enter the uncharted area of
the Amur Bend, in Manchuria, at that time controlled by the Japanese.
He spent a whole year assembling permits, passports and papers, surmounting one obstacle
after another. Then he travelled the entire length of the Amur, 2750 miles, a distance from
England to Newfoundland, three times the length of the Rhine. The Amur drains all of the
swampland of the Siberian taiga. The water is as clear as crystal, and was called by the
Chinese the Black River, to distinguish it from the silt laden yellow rivers which drain China.
He reached the northernmost point of Manchuria safely, lived in the trackless taiga and got to
know the people living there. He remained in the forests of Manchuria and the steppes of
Mongolia for some years. These photographs are a testimony to his endurance and strength of
character.
Another excellent book for those interested particularly in the cave bear is 'The Cave Bear
Story' by Bjorn Kurten, published in 1976.
The Bear
The bear possesses a soul just as the human being does. The Orochi are as steadfastly
convinced of this as they are of the idea that there is a girl carrying a pail of water on the
moon. No Tungus ever kills this largest and most powerful predator in the Siberian forests
without a compelling reason. Yet it is not the bear's strength which fills the Tungus with such
awe and respect nor the elemental power of the mighty beast which makes them tremble.
There are deeper reasons for their dread of the bear's soul. A bear's facial expression can be
extraordinarily human at times. A bear can walk upright on two legs and when skinned bears
a gruesome resemblance to a man. Finally, there is an ancient belief that the bear is in
communication with the Lord of the Mountains and with the sky, and certainly he has from
time immemorial been surrounded by an aura which enjoins caution and respect.
Very large numbers of brown bear live in the North Manchurian taiga. There is Ursus arctos,
which inhabits the densest forests of central and northern Asia, Eurasian Russia and the coasts
of the Sea of Okhotsk. I also saw the massive gray bear, the largest surviving predator on
earth, which resembles the grizzly or giant bear of Alaska or Ursus arctos horribilis, the
Kodiak bear. This animal has been described as bulky, clumsy and awkward, but sharp,
curved claws, immensely powerful masticatory equipment and bunches of neck and shoulder
muscle make even the heaviest bear an agile climber and allow him to haul his massive body
up trees by the brute force of his arms and legs.
The Grizzly Bear - Ursus arctos horribilus
Bears are found on every continent except Australia and Antarctica.

The eight species of bears are: the spectacled bear, the Asiatic black
bear, the American black bear, the brown bear (including grizzlies),
the polar bear, the sun bear, the sloth bear, and the giant panda.
Photo: http://www.blueplanetbiomes.org/grizzly_bear.htm
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
Life restoration of Ursavus, the earliest bear, by Margaret

Lambert.
Paleogeographic map of Europe in mid-Miocene times, about

20 million years ago, shows a continent still partitioned by
great interior seas and lakes.

Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story' writes:
Our story may well begin about 20 million years ago, in the early part of the Miocene epoch
of earth history. The place is what is now called Wintershof-West in the Bavarian mountains
of southern Germany. In those very distant times, Europe was a subtropical land. Moisture-
laden monsoons blew in from an Atlantic that was narrower and a Mediterranean that was
broader than their counterparts today. Much of the continent was clothed in luxuriant forests
in which grew palms, camphor trees, and many other warmth-loving species. The rivers
teemed with crocodilians, and many strange and ungainly looking creatures inhabited the
land. The time when man was to arise was still in the very distant future, and his ancestors
were small, apelike creatures that were confined to the African continent.
In the limestone areas of Miocene Europe fissures and caves riddled the rocks, providing
shelter for many mammals, birds, and reptiles. The fissure at Wintershof-West was a favored
den for small carnivores, who left their bones and teeth in profusion in the earth that gradually
filled the cavity. True, there are also the remains of some big bear-dogs -or dog-bears-that
seem to have inhabited the cave from time to time. But the majority of the remains are those
of small weasel- or skunklike animals, cats, and viverrids - early relatives of the mongooses
and genets of today.
Among the small carnivores we also find remains of a creature about the size of a fox terrier,
but which is neither dog, cat, or weasel. Latter-day scientists have given it the name Ursavus
elmensis. It is with this small creature that the true bear line of evolution may be said to start.
Actually, we can go still further back in time; we know the ancestor of Ursavus, but it is more
doglike than bearlike, and so many scholars place it in the dog family. With Ursavus we come
to the first animal definitely reckoned to be a bear, though indeed a very small and primitive
one.
According to its remains, little Ursavus still had all its premolars, and they were slicing teeth
of a truly carnivorous cast, just as in a dog. Its carnassials, on the other hand, were already
taking on a bearlike look, and the molars show the beginning of the expansion of chewing
surface that was to characterize the bear teeth of later times.
Upper cheek teeth of various bears, showing the progressive

lengthening of the molars and the increase in size from the early
Ursavus elmensis. Ursavus depereti was the last and largest of the
Ursavus line. The Etruscan bear, Ursus etruscus, gave rise to the
brown bear, Ursus arctos, and the cave bear, Ursus spelaeus. After
Kurten.
Shortness and plumpness distinguish the cave bear foot bone (right) when
compared to that of the brown bear. These are first metatarsals, or
middlefoot bones of the inner toe in the hind foot. The cave bear bone comes
from Odessa, USSR; the brown bear bone belonged to an animal that lived
during the penultimate glaciation (the Saalian) in Devon, England, and was
found in Tornewton Cave.
The small ancestral bear, Ursus minimus, from the Pliocene of southern
France. The drawing shows the skull and jaw as preserved, and details of the
upper (bottom left) and lower (bottom right) cheek teeth. After Viret.
We are now in the Pliocene epoch of earth history, starting some 5 or 6 million years ago. Our
stage moves to Roussillon and Perpignan in the south of France (and a contemporary site in
Hungary), where we find the first member of the genus Ursus. He bears the name Ursus
minimus, and he is indeed the smallest known member of his genus and the most primitive
too. He probably reached about the size of the living sun bear or Malay bear, which is the
smallest of the living bears.
Except for size, the resemblance between Ursus minimus and the Malay bear is not very
close. For example, if you look closely at a Malay bear, you may note its remarkably stout
eyeteeth. In contrast, the Pliocene Ursus minimus has slender, gracile canines. It also has a
complete set of premolars, retaining their sharp, slicing character, although they are much less
prominent than in the ancient ursavi.
The grinders, on the other hand, have become more enlarged. So we can see how the trends
initiated so many millions of years earlier are still going on, very slowly and gradually,
towards the condition of the true bears.
At the time of Ursus minimus, the world was already on the threshold of the Ice Age. The
climate was cooler than in the Miocene epoch and, as centuries and millennia passed, there
was a slow swing between cooler and warmer conditions. In the high mountains and in the far
north, ice caps waxed and waned with this secular climatic rhythm.
The forests where the first Ursus lived were quite different from the subtropical world of the
Miocene ursavi. They were of the temperate type, containing deciduous trees and conifers.
Palms were now unknown north of the Pyrenees and Alps, and crocodilians were gone from
the streams. With the Pliocene epoch, the long Tertiary period finally came to an end. And far
to the south, in Africa, small bands of a remarkable, new sort of biped were already moving
about on the ground, using stones and sticks to hunt small game. But the first encounter
between man and bear was still in the distant future.
As the Ice Age drew nearer, it was as if the tempo of world events were accelerating. About 4
million years ago, large oxlike animals made their first appearance on the scene: they later
gave rise to bison, buffalo, and wild oxen. Somewhat later, a new breed of trunk-bearing
animals migrated from Africa into Eurasia-the elephants and mammoths. A new chapter of
earth history was indeed being written. We call it the Villafranchian age, the prelude to the Ice
Age.
In the early Villafranchian age we still see Ursus minimus around, although he has changed a
bit. He is somewhat larger than in the old times, and there have also been small, all but
imperceptible, changes in his teeth. Bears of this kind were widely distributed in the Old
World, and recent finds in North America show that this species, or a very closely related one,
was present there too. The two living species of black bear, the American (Ursus americanus)
and the Himalayan (Ursus thibetanus) are probably descended from Ursus minimus.
During the early Villafranchian age, about 3 million years ago, one-toed horses spread from
America into the Old World, and rapidly penetrated Eurasia and Africa. The old hipparions
lingered for some time but were gradually ousted, and eventually they vanished.
By mid-Villafranchian times, some 2.5 million years ago, changes had proceeded far enough
for Ursus minimus to give rise to a new species: the Etruscan bear, Ursus etruscus, the typical
bear of the later Villafranchian. This species, whose characters are known through numerous
remains in Spain, France, and Italy, was also present in China. In the flesh it probably
resembled living black bears, though of course its color is unknown to us. Through the
Villafranchian age this trend towards large size continued in the Etruscan bear; late
Villafranchian forms are larger than mid-Villafranchian ones.
Skull of the Etruscan bear,

Ursus etruscus, from the Val
d'Arno in northern Italy.
Closely related to the living
brown bears, it had a
somewhat more primitive
dentition. Original in the
Natural History Museum,
Basle.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976,

'The Cave Bear Story'
The world of the Etruscan bear was already one in which continental icefields developed from
time to time, only to melt again as the climate ameliorated. The Ice Age was nigh, and the
pendulum swung between fully glacial conditions on one hand and interglacial conditions on
the other, when the climate was as warm as now, or warmer. And it is in one of the early
interglacials, about 1.5 million years ago, that we meet the last of the Etruscan bears.
This interglacial is called the Tiglian, after the old Roman name for Tegelen, a site in the
Netherlands where rich deposits from this age have been found. The Etruscan bear is now as
big as the living European brown bear, but it still carries the full complement of premolars
(albeit very small ones) as an inheritance from the ancient ursavi and their doglike
predecessors.
With the Tiglian interglacial, the Villafranchian age may be said to have come to an end: the
prelude is over, and we are in the true Ice Age, the Pleistocene epoch of earth history.
The Tiglian comes to a close. In the Alps mountain glaciers grow larger, coalesce, and send
icy tongues down along the valleys. They grow ever greater and finally engulf the mountain
range, with only a few bare peaks protruding out of the frozen waste. Glaciation is upon the
world again, and this glaciation is called the Donau (Danube).
Many thousands of years pass with great tracts of the earth's surface as if immobilized in icy
stillness. Then, once more, comes the swing. Glaciers melt and retreat, and areas recently
under ice emerge to be conquered by plants and animals.
Among those animals who return to the lands of their Tiglian ancestors we find the
descendant of the Etruscan bear. Again, evolution has taken a step forward, for he has
changed. The anterior premolars, already very small in the Etruscan bear, are now almost
gone; in some individuals all are lacking, but many retain one or more of these vestigial
structures.
Accompanying this change there is a tendency to a doming of the forehead, foreshadowing

the cave bear condition. This new species of bear is called Savin's bear, Ursus savini, and it
lived about I million years ago in the interglacial termed the Waalian. Its remains have been
found in various sites, for example Bacton in East Anglia, England, and the Hundsheim
fissure in Austria. Although large and impressive enough, these early cave bears were still
much smaller, on average, than the true cave bear.

The pendulum swings again: cold conditions are back. The Gunz glaciation reached its
culmination some 800,000 to 900,000 years before the present. There is some evidence that in
one of the cold phases that make up the Gunz, longer-limbed bears, perhaps from the East,
pressed into Europe to supplant temporarily the stocky-legged Savin's bear, but the problem
of whether this intruder was a distinct species or just a steppe race of the early cave bear has
not been settled. The latter alternative appears perhaps the most likely one.
The ice melts and the world is green once more as the wind of the Cromerian interglacial
blows over the European scene. And man meets bear.
That encounter is only one of the remarkable things that happened in the Cromerian
interglacial, which takes its name from the Cromer Forest Bed in East Anglia. It is a layer
very rich in organic remains, including tree trunks, fossil beaver dams, and a copious number
of bones.
From a chronological point of view, perhaps the most interesting event of the Cromerian
interglacial is the reversal of the earth's magnetic field. Such reversals have happened at many
times in the history of the earth, with intervals between lasting about a million years.
Evidence of these reversals is found in the magnetic properties of the rocks that formed during
a given interval. For instance, all of the rocks that form now carry the imprint of the "normal"
polarity, while rocks formed in other times may have "reversed" polarity - north is south and
south is north. The latest such reversal is known to have occurred 700,000 years ago in the
age of the Cromerian.
There is evidence of Cromerian man in Europe at Mauer near Heidelberg, Germany, where a
rich interglacial fauna quite similar to that of the Cromer Forest Bed has been discovered.
During the 1960s, in a cave by Petralona in Greece, the same association of human fossils and
Cromerian mammals was found. At both sites, bear remains are very common indeed. Mauer
and Petralona contain the earliest finds of human fossils together with bear remains.
The bones of Cromerian man reveal a type of human still very primitive in many respects, yet
closely related to us and probably our direct ancestor. He resembles the contemporary and
better-known men of east and southeast Asia called Homo erectus (formerly Pithecanthropus),
but also bears a certain resemblance to the late Pleistocene Neandertal men of Europe, to
whom he presumably was ancestral. Of what happened between man and bear in the
Cromerian we have no evidence.
The bear of the Cromerian may well be regarded as a full-fledged cave bear. True, it is still a
little smaller, although clearly larger and longer jawed than its ancestor the Savin's bear. Also,
the vaulting of its forehead is less prominent and its grinders are not quite as expanded as in
the late Pleistocene animal. And so it has been given a species name of its own, and is known
as Deninger's bear, Ursus deningeri. But there is much to say for just regarding it as an early,
primitive race of Ursus spelaeus. We may compromise by calling it Deninger's cave bear.
But there is no rest for the pendulum of climate. Again there is a swing to cold conditions -
the Elster glaciation - and then back to warm - the Holsteinian interglacial. We are now
roughly 300,000 years before the present, and the bear in existence is Ursus spelaeus without
any doubt. His remains have been found in caves in Germany and France, and especially
interesting is the find of a good skull in the river gravels at Swanscombe outside London,
England, which have also yielded a skull of early man.
The recounting of the long evolutionary history of the cave bear line may seem tedious, but it
should give some understanding of how complete the evidence of its evolution really is. From
the early Ursus minimus of 5 million years ago to the late Pleistocene cave bear, which
became extinct only a few thousand years ago, there is a perfectly complete evolutionary
sequence without any real gaps. The transition is slow and gradual throughout, and it is quite
difficult to say where one species ends and the next begins. Where should we draw the
boundary between Ursus minimus and Ursus etruscus, or between Ursus savini and Ursus
spelaeus? The history of the cave bear becomes a demonstration of evolution, not as a
hypothesis or theory but as a simple fact of record.
Geography of Europe in Weichselian times shows the northern parts of the

continent covered by great icefields; smaller glaciations have formed on the
mountain ranges further south. A large area is tundra; the southern
peninsulas are partly forested. The sea has receded, exposing the bottom of
the North Sea and the English Channel; the Caspian is much enlarged,
flooding the plains of southern Russia. Data from Konigsson.
Mean July temperatures for western Europe during the last 80,000 years of earth history.
Names of warm oscillations are indicated, beginning with the Eemian interglacial and ending
with the Flandrian interglacial, which is still going on. Intervening warm phases are termed
interstadials. Data from van der Hammen.
British river scene in the Eemian interglacial, with cave hyenas,

hippopotami, bison and (in the distance) straight-tusked elephant.
The skull of fallow deer may be seen at the entrance of the cave, left
foreground. Restoration by Margaret Lambert; after Sutcliffe.
( note that below we have two different interpretations of the diet of Cave Bears, one
postulating that they were totally vegetarian, the other that they were omnivorous - Don )
Cave Bears were vegans

Senckenberg scientists have studied the feeding habits of the extinct Cave Bear. Based
on the isotope composition in the collagen of the bears' bones, they were able to show
that the large mammals subsisted on a purely vegan diet. In the study, recently
published in the scientific publication Journal of Quaternary Science, the international
team proposes that it was this inflexible diet that led to the Cave Bear's extinction
approximately 25 000 years ago.
Today's Brown Bears are omnivores. Depending on the time of year, they devour plants,
mushrooms, berries and small to larger mammals, but they will also take fish and insects. 'The
Cave Bear is a very different story,' says Professor Dr. Hervé Bocherens of the Senckenberg
Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (HEP) at the University of Tübingen,
and he continues to explain, 'According to our newest findings, these extinct relatives of the
Brown Bear lived on a strictly vegan diet.'
Cave Bears (Ursus spelaeus) lived in Europe during the most recent glacial period,
approximately 400 000 years ago, until they became extinct about 25 000 years ago. With a
length of 3.5 meters and a height of 1.7 meters at the shoulder, these bears, which ranged from
Northern Spain to the Urals, were noticeably larger than their modern-day relatives. Despite
their name, they did not actually live in caves but only used them for hibernation.
Nevertheless, the occasional death of animals in various European caves over several tens of
thousands of years eventually led to enormous accumulations of bones and teeth from these
large fur-bearing animals.
Several of these bones from the 'Goyet Cave' in Belgium have now been examined by the
international team around Prof. Bocherens, with a special focus on the Cave Bear's diet. 'We
were particularly interested in what exactly the Cave Bears ate, and whether there is a
connection between their diet and their extinction,' explains the biogeologist from Tübingen.
To this end, scientists from Japan, Canada, Belgium and Germany conducted isotope studies
on the collagen from the bears' bones. Collagen is an essential organic component of the
connective tissue in bones, teeth, cartilage, tendons, ligaments and the skin. The examination
of the isotope composition of individual amino acids in the collagen shows that the bears lived
on a strictly vegan diet. 'Similar to today's Giant Panda, the Cave Bears were therefore
extremely inflexible in regard to their food,' adds Bocherens, and he continues, 'We assume
that this unbalanced diet, in combination with the reduced supply of plants during the last ice
age, ultimately led to the Cave Bear's extinction.'
Previously, there had been much speculation as to the cause of the large bears' disappearance.
Was it due to increasing hunting pressure from humans? The changing temperatures, or the
lack of food? 'We believe that the reliance on a purely vegan diet was a crucial reason for the
Cave Bear's extinction,' explains Bocherens.
During the investigation, another interesting aspect came to light. Even the collagen of two
Cave Bear cubs indicated a vegan diet -- despite the fact that they were suckled by their
mother. The scientists interpret this finding as a reflection of the nursing female's diet.
'We now intend to examine additional Cave Bear bones from various European locations with
this new method, as well as conducting controlled feeding experiments with modern bears, in
order to further solidify our proposition,' adds Bocherens by way of a preview.
Text above from: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160823083557.htm

Primary Source: Yuichi et al. (2016)
Below an excellent post (as always, the man is phenomenal for his vast knowledge and the
ability to communicate) from the John Hawks Weblog:
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals
January 2008
How carnivorous were cave bears?
Charles Q. Choi reports on a new paper by Michael Richards and colleagues:
For the past 30 years, studies of their skulls, jaws and teeth suggested cave bears might have
been largely herbivorous. In addition, the bones of central and western European cave bears
matched those of vegetarians in having low levels of nitrogen-15, whose atomic nucleus has
one more neutron than common nitrogen-14 does. Animals accumulate nitrogen-15 in their
bodies, and animals that eat animals -- that is, carnivores -- build up more nitrogen-15 than
herbivores do.
Still, black bears and brown bears are omnivores. This suggested that although some cave
bears were largely vegetarian, others might have been more carnivorous.
New data from the Pestera cu Oase ("Cave with Bones") in the southwestern tip of the
Carpathian mountains in Romania now hints most of its cave bears were significantly
carnivorous, due to their high nitrogen-15 levels.
It's PNAS, so we won't see the paper for a while. I'll comment more fully here when it is
available. Nitrogen-15 is the primary evidence for Neandertal carnivory also, although as I've
noted (here and here), those interpretations face some complications.
A large source of nitrogen-15 is fish, which seems a likely source for the cave bears.
UPDATE (2008/01/08): I got the paper. The results show that the Oase cave bears have
nitrogen-15 values ranging from a low overlapping with red deer up to a high midway through
the wolves -- where higher means more carnivorous. There was one outlier with a very low
nitrogen-15 ratio. The impressive thing is the range of values, which apparently exceeds the
ranges in other species.
In comparison with other European cave bear samples, the Oase specimens are not alone in
showing evidence of carnivory, but the vast majority of specimens from other sites (n=105)
have values in the red deer range or lower.
Axes of variation
The paper suggests that the high nitrogen-15 in the Oase cave bears could not have come from
the local ungulates (red deer and ibex) because their carbon-13 ratios are extremely different
from those species. I think that's a fair speculation, but really there are too many dietary
parameters to get an estimate from these two ratios. For example, a primarily vegetarian diet
that included a significant amount of fish might explain both ratios (and the wide variation in
nitrogen-15, since bears compete for fishing access).
But there are other possible axes of variation. Life history and behavioral variation can affect
the isotope ratios. Some of the cave bears across Europe have very low (lower than ungulate)
nitrogen-15 values. Hibernation has been suggested previously to explain the correlation of
nitrogen-15 values with estimates of temperature, the idea being that bears facing colder
winters are dormant for longer periods.
The hibernation story raises the question of the impact of long-term climate change on isotope
ratios. The channel through which climate changes may affect the uptake of different isotopes
into plants and animals is unclear -- it seems to involve temperature and rainfall as they
modulate diet availability.
None of this casts any doubt on the paper's results -- the Oase cave bears simply seem to have
been higher on the food chain than most other cave bears sampled across Europe. I just raise
them to note the demands that paleoecologists are placing on these isotope ratios. Especially
when the species in question has substantial dietary flexibility, like bears, we should probably
figure that diet choices are the largest component of variation. That means that we should
probably be skeptical about the impact of smaller-scale variations, such as climate, unless
there is very strong evidence for dietary stability over the relevant time scales.
Since many large European mammals were undergoing large range contractions or extinctions
during this time period, we should expect that the surviving species may have undergone
substantial changes in niche partitioning and dietary choices. Humans -- whose isotope ratios
are in many ways the most interesting -- would be included in this number.
Bear paleoecology
I think the best passage from the paper is the end of the discussion, where the authors
compare the dietary and ecological flexibility of extant ursids as a way of contextualizing the
cave bears.
As a consequence of these 15N values, the dietary ecology of modern, higher-latitude bears
(excluding polar bears) is relevant for that of cave bears, especially the North American
brown bears (U. arctos, including the Kodiak and grizzly bears) given their high-latitude
range, body-size variation, occupation of regions with less human ecological impact than
most of Eurasia, and extensive database. Brown bear diets range from almost completely
vegetarian, including ones with substantial amounts of fruit/berries, to ones containing a
substantial amount of fish and/or ungulate meat (19-21, 29, 30, 44, 45). All aspects of their
omnivorous diets have limitations in availability, potential feeding rates, and nutritional value
in any given environment; adequate weight gain for survival, reproduction, and hibernation
therefore depends on a mix of as many food resources as are available (19, 21). Meat
consumption, in particular, varies widely among and within brown bear populations, due,
among non-maritime bears, to the availability of ungulate fauna (29, 30, 44, 45). Large adult
males also appear to be more carnivorous than females or subadult bears (28, 29). North
American black bears (U. americanus) appear to have similar plant/meat dietary proportions
as brown bears (29), except that the larger brown bears are frequently more carnivorous when
the prime meat is maritime (e.g., salmon) (46). This ecological flexibility of modern brown
bears therefore makes an appropriate model to understand the range of isotopic values now
available for European cave bears, both within and between site-specific samples (Richards et
al. 2008:4).
Europe presents a problem of bear competition similar in many ways to the current North
American case, in that different ecologically flexible species are differentiated by size. In
North America, the larger brown bears exclude access to salmon fishing sites from the smaller
black bears.
But in Europe, the brown bears were the smaller species. That helps to make sense of the
isotope results on Pleistocene European brown bears, which have even lower nitrogen-15
values than the cave bears (Bocherens et al. 2004).
A genetic afterthought
There is also this:
Genetic Affinities. To provide additional confirmation of the morphological evidence,

mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) was extracted, amplified, and sequenced from 19 ursid samples
(SI Table 2). All 19 individual sequences of the Peçstera cu Oase ursids show clear affinity to
central European cave bear sequences (35) rather than to brown bears. They do not form a
monophyletic group within cave bear mtDNA variation, and the range of the Oase bear
haplotypes is spread throughout most of the variability known for central European cave bear
populations from southern Germany, Austria, Croatia, and Slovakia (35-37).
If we expect to have any hope of working out the phylogeography of ancient humans (like
Neandertals), then we have to be able to work out the movements of many ancient mammals.
That's the only chance of cross-The cave bears look a bit like the Neandertal pattern --
probably not surprising since they are both medium-bodied omnivorous mammals. That's
encouraging.
References:
Bocherens et al. (2004)

Hedges et al. (2004)
Richards et al. (2008)
Two cave bears that died in Austria more than 40 000 years
ago have had their nuclear DNA sequenced. The technique
used to recover sequences from a tooth and a bone has more
than doubled the age at which this kind of DNA can be
recovered - and could mean Neanderthals are next.
Recovering genetic material from ancient remains is fraught

with difficulty because DNA degrades rapidly and is easily
contaminated. Most successful studies have focused on the more abundant mitochondrial
DNA, but this is much less useful. In exceptional cases nuclear DNA has been extracted from
remains less than 20 000 years old if preserved in permafrost or desert environments.
Now Eddy Rubin of the US Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek,
California, and his team have turned to computers for help. They sequenced everything in the
sample, contamination and all, then picked out sequences averaging 70 base pairs that
matched parts of the dog genome - chosen because it is the closest relative of bears to have a
fully sequenced genome.
They recovered nearly 27 000 base pairs of nuclear DNA from the cave bears, which became
extinct around 15 000 years ago (Science, DOI: 10.11261science.1113485). "it is a significant
advance to show that so much nuclear DNA is actually being preserved," says Beth Shapiro,
who studies ancient DNA extraction at the University of Oxford.
"This is very much a proof of principle," says Rubin. "We're not interested in cave bears -
we're interested in Neanderthals."
Text and Photo from the weekly science magazine New Scientist 11 June 2005
From:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0606_050606_alpsbears.html
Ancient Bear DNA Mapped -- A First for Extinct Species
Photograph copyright Gernot Rabeder, Institute of Paleontology,

University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Stefan Lovgren
for National Geographic News
June 6, 2005
Scientists have sequenced the DNA of two cave bears that roamed the Austrian Alps some
40 000 years ago. It marks the first time researchers have been able to completely sequence
the DNA of a species that has long been extinct.
The research opens the door to sequencing the DNA genome of other extinct species,
including the Neandertals (often spelled "Neanderthals").
"We have shown that it is possible to sequence the genome of a long-extinct organism,
something previously considered to be in the realm of science fiction," said James Noonan, a
geneticist and postdoctoral fellow in the genomics division at the Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory in California.
Noonan is the lead author of the study, which appeared in the June 2 online edition of the
journal Science.
DNA Nucleus
Until now scientists have been unable to extract pure DNA from the cell nuclei of ancient
animals. Not only does DNA start to degrade at death, but the microbes that eat away at dead
animals contaminate genomic DNA, which is found in cell nucei. Other contaminants may
include human DNA left through contact, such as when a scientist handles the bones.
Rather than use genomic DNA, most studies of ancient DNA have used mitochondrial DNA.
A sort of cellular power plant, mitochondria have their own type of DNA and are believed to
have evolved separately from genomic DNA.
Only genomic DNA, however, can help scientists understand the functional differences
between extinct and living species.
Because unbroken strands of ancient DNA are so hard to come by, previous ancient-DNA
studies have used a biochemical amplification method to create a string of DNA. In effect,
they take an unbroken fragment of DNA and copy it over and over to create a complete
strand. But this only works for mitochondrial DNA, not genomic DNA.
Needle in a Haystack
This time the scientists took a different approach. First they extracted genomic DNA from two
40,000-year-old cave bear bones from Austria.
Extinct for more than 10,000 years, cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) were related to the ancestors
of modern brown bears and polar bears. Cave paintings show that ancient humans
encountered cave bears.
The researchers sequenced all of the genomic DNA they could get out of the cave bear bones.
Without amplifying any of it, they then identified each sequence by comparing it to the
complete dog-genome sequence that is publicly available. Dogs and bears, which diverged
some 50 million years ago, are 92 percent similar on the sequence level.
"[It was] sort of like looking for a needle in a haystack," said Eddy Rubin, the director of the
U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, California, where the
work was done. "Fortunately the computer was a great magnet for finding the needles we
were interested in."
About 6 percent of the sample that was sequenced yielded undamaged cave bear DNA, while
the rest was a hodgepodge of microbial contaminants. Within those fractions of cave bear
DNA were bits of genes.
Comparing the ancient bear sequences with those of modern bears, the scientists showed that
cave bears were more closely related to brown bears than to black bears.
"It shows that we got enough ancient genomic DNA to learn something biologically relevant
about the cave bear," Noonan said.
Human Evolution
The cave bear DNA sequencing opens the door to the testing of other extinct species,
including our nearest prehistoric relatives, the Neandertals. The scientists say they plan to
sequence the Neandertal genome over the next several years.
Another possibility is to apply these techniques to the remains of Homo floresiensis, found
recently in Indonesia. Researchers nicknamed this human ancestor "the hobbit" because of its
tiny stature.
H. floresiensis is believed to have diverged from modern humans two million years ago.
Neandertals may have diverged from humans 500 000 years ago.
The successful DNA sequencing of the two human-ancestor species could help scientists
describe the evolutionary events that led to modern humans.
What about sequencing the DNA from dinosaur fossils?
"Unfortunately, we don't think [that] will ever be possible," Noonan said. "DNA does not
survive beyond a hundred thousand years under the environmental conditions in which we
found our cave bear remains. And of course, dinosaur fossils are at least 65 million years old."
Distribution of the cave bear, Ursus spelaeus, in the
Pleistocene. Each dot represents one or more sites with
fossils of the species; two North African records are
uncertain. Only Holsteinian and later records are included.
The actual number of sites is many times greater than the
dots, and some sites may contain the remains of hundreds or
thousands of bears.
Upper canines of male and female cave bears, both drawn to the same scale to show sexual
dimorphism in size. Most canine teeth of the cave bear are easily identified as to sex.
Cave Bear canine teeth
Photo: http://www.rotondarock.com/RR-00682
Width of lower canines in samples of cave bear shows distribution into two size groups,
representing male and female individuals respectively. In the large Weichselian bears from
Mixnitz and Odessa, male canines average about 22 millimeters in width (see scale at
bottom), female less than 17 millimeters. In the smaller Eemian cave bears from the
Dachstein cave, male canines average 18-19 millimeters in width, female canines about 14
millimeters. After Kurten.
Skull of a small, probably Holsteinian-age cave bear from Krasnodar, USSR, compared with
that of a large Weichselian cave bear (light outline). After Borissiak.

What happens when man meets bear? Half a century ago, an amazing answer came from the
Swiss Alps.
During the years 1917 to 1921 Emil Bachler, of the museum in St. Gallen, Switzerland, dug
the Drachenloch Cave - one of the "Dragon's Lairs" - near Vattis in the Tamina Valley. The
cave, at an altitude of 7,335 feet (2,240 metres) above sea level, forms a deep tunnel running
more than 200 feet (70 metres) into the cliff. The deposit in the cave turned out to contain an
immense number of cave bear remains, including several well-preserved skulls and complete
limb bones. At that elevation, the site would have been inaccessible during the glaciation; thus
the bears must date from the interglacial, the time of early Neandertal man in Europe.
Cross section of the Drachenloch Cave as published by Bachler in 1923,

showing stratigraphy of the deposits in the cave and the position of stone
chests containing skulls and bones.
Cross section of Drachenloch Cave as given by Bachler in 1940.
It is even more unfortunate that Bachler's two sketches, published in 1923 and 1940 and
purporting to show the chests and their situation within the cave, are quite contradictory. They
agree in showing the chest resting upon layer V in the sequence of strata in the cave (the
layers were numbered from top to bottom). They also agree in the outline of the cave walls
and ceiling, showing that both pictures are supposed to represent a north - south cross section.
Otherwise, however, hardly anything is the same.
In the figure of 1923, for instance, a large chest is shown with two skulls seen in profile,
facing south. Layer IV, which rests on top of the chest, contains various long bones and a
skull facing the same way. Beside it is another, slightly smaller chest containing long bones.
The walls of the chests are made of small, horizontal, even slabs resembling bricks.
In the 1940 picture, the big stone chest is still there, but this time it contains six or seven
skulls, all of which face east (presumably a more orthodox direction, comments Koby). The
second chest with the long bones is now much smaller, and, in addition, a sort of wall has
appeared at the southern end, enclosing more bones. The walls of the chest are now built of
vertical slabs, and the skull in layer IV has vanished. "Le myth est définitivement cristallisé,"
remarked Koby.
These are not, of course, the only finds at Drachenloch Cave that suggested to Bachler the
ordering hand of Paleolithic man. There was, for instance, a bear skull with the thigh bone of
another bear stuck through its cheek in such a way that it could only have been got in by
twisting it around. In 1940, Bachler noted the find of a skull resting upon two parallel shin
bones (tibiae). It is the same skull, but in 1921 the thighbone was stuck through the left cheek,
and in 1940, through the right. Also, Bachler's description does not agree with the picture, for
the sketch shows the whole arrangement of bones resting upon a flat slab of rock, while the
description states that "curiously enough, this small deposit of bones did not have a stone slab
for a base." Actually, Bachler was not present when the find was made.
Is there, then, any other evidence of the presence of man, apart from this 'curious arranging of
the bones? In fact they are precious few. There are no flint implements. There are no burnt
bones. There are no butchering cuts on the bones. All there is are some hearths, indicating that
an occasional visitor or group made a brief stop. Any prolonged stay would certainly have
been reflected in the sprinkling of numerous flints.
But how could such elaborate structures as the suggested stone coffins have come about if not
erected by man? And the alignment of the bones? There is no question of a hoax. Bachler was
known as an honorable, ardently patriotic man, and he certainly believed in the existence of
the stone chests that he described.
To understand this situation we must go into how bear skulls and bones are actually preserved
in caves. And the story begins with a hibernating cave bear dying in the cave (just why it died
does not concern us for the moment).
It would sometimes happen that after death the great bear cadaver remained unnoticed by
scavengers such as hyenas, wolves, and gluttons and was left to moulder away. (The glutton is
a relation of the martens and sables. Having also somewhat nomadic habits, it is constantly
migrating within its enormous hunting territory, reaching sometimes 1,000 square miles. In
appearance this animal resembles rather a small bear than the marten, being of heavy build
with round ears and long brownish shaggy fur. It is about two and one half feet long and can
weigh about 37-40 pounds. It inhabits the tundra and taiga regions of both Eurasia and North
America)
As the soft parts disintegrated, great amounts of phosphate were produced. Now, the deposit
in a bear cave is often very rich in this substance, which may make up as much as 50 to 55
percent of the total, and often is mined commercially. Bat guano, which is found in some bear
caves, also contains phosphate, but the content is much lower, less than 10 percent. So the
main part of the phosphate found in bear caves came from rotting bear flesh.
Skin and flesh gone, the cadaver winds up as a skeleton lying on the cave floor where the bear
died. But this is only the beginning of its story; more about it presently.
It could also happen that scavengers did come across the body; they would eat the soft parts
and pull the skeleton to pieces. Hyenas might smash some of the bones. Hyenas are known to
swallow quite large pieces of bone, which are regurgitated. after some time, more or less
affected by bowel juices and movements. The result may be curiously suggestive of human
interference: perfectly round holes may appear in the bones, pieces of bone may become
wedged together as if intentionally, and so on. Also, the hyena-bitten bones splinter into sharp
edges and so may take on the appearance of implements fashioned by man.
The end result of the scavengers' work is now a disarticulated skeleton scattered over the floor
of the cave, the individual bones in varying states of disrepair.
In time the cave will get a new inhabitant, most likely another cave bear, which will enter it in
the autumn to prepare for hibernation. The bones and fragments on the floor will be in the
bear's way and will be trampled to pieces.
The larger objects, for instance such skulls and long bones that have not been broken into
fragments, will be pushed to the side. Typically, they will finish up somewhere by the walls;
as every bear cave explorer knows, most of the wellpreserved skulls are found by the walls of
the cave. The chance of surviving is particularly good if they get pushed into a niche that
protects them from rockfall and other damage.
"In the Petershohle in Germany a rock niche, situated like a cupboard in the rock, contained
five Cave Bear skulls, two thigh bones, and one brachial bone," stated Professor Abel in 1935.
He went on to say, "All these pieces must have been put into this niche by Ice Age Man, as a
deposit formed by water is quite out of the question."
Of course it does not have to be a niche in the wall. Any kind of protecting rock will do. Such
protecting niches may be produced at any place in the cave by rockfall from the ceiling.
Percolating and freezing water gradually widens the cracks in the limestone that forms the
bedrock of the cave. The cracks often form in the bedding plane of the limestone. In time,
pieces of rock, some of them flattish slabs, are dislodged and fall down on the floor.
If there is already rubble on the floor, the rock may be left in a more or less vertical position
and will be likely to protect the bones that get pushed in beside it. Further rockfall from the
roof may occur in the same place, and in many cases will result in slabs being left in standing
or semierect positions if they hit obstructions already present on the floor.
Meanwhile, the cave deposit is slowly built up by the dust brought in by animals, by the
guano dropped by bats, which often roost in great numbers in caves, and by the products of
the disintegration of the various animals that die in the cave. In time, the cave earth will also
fill the interstices in the niches or "chests," and we arrive at a final situation that, with some
moderate stretching of the imagination, may well be ascribed to deliberate burials.
It is evident that repeated pushing of such elongate objects as skulls, jaws, and long bones into
niches or along walls will inevitably tend to align them in the same direction, suggesting that
they were positioned by intent. In fact, all of the pushing, trampling, gnawing, biting,
swallowing and regurgitating, pounding by falling rocks, and so on, which the bones undergo
in a well-frequented cave-and which Koby comprises , under the single term "dry transport"
("charriage a sec")-is likely to produce, from time to time, the most peculiar results.
And we must remember that such freaks or oddities are precisely the ones that tend to be
selected for survival by natural agencies. For instance, skulls in niches are likely to be
preserved, while skulls in the middle of the cave floor will be trampled to fragments and
survive only as isolated teeth and pieces of bone pushed down into the earth. It is estimated
that some 30,000 to 50,000 bears died in the Dragon Cave near Mixnitz, but only some 76
good skulls were found. One skull out of 500 or thereabouts! No wonder skulls in bear caves
look as if somebody had put them in a safe place.
Taking this possibility into account, it now seems impossible to accept the evidence for
deliberate burials of bear skulls and other bones in the Drachenloch Cave near Vattis. The
same goes for other sites, such as the Petershohle in southern Germany, the Dragon Cave near
Mixnitz in Austria, and the Wildenmannisloch in Switzerland, where deliberate positioning of
skulls and bones has been claimed though not in actual "chests."
In the Petershohle, for example, 'a great accumulation of skulls was found together with a lot
of rocks; one skull was close to a hearth, but the bone showed no trace of burning. Of course
the rock rubble would tend to protect those skulls that came to rest among the stones, so that
the whole arrangement may perfectly well be due to natural causes. In the Mixnitz cave there
is a lateral passage called the Abel Gallery, which was found to contain no less than forty-two
bear skulls and many long bones. Here, too, man was supposed to have intervened, but Joseph
Schadler considered natural causes sufficient to account for the accumulation.
In the Wildenmannisloch, Bachler found bear skulls with slabs of limestone resting on top,
"making the impression of having been intentionally placed in a horizontal position," an
impression that is rather weakened by the reflection that most flat slabs of rock will naturally
come to rest in a horizontal position.
Enthusiasm for the "bear cult" is naturally contagious. Secondhand and third hand quotations
from the original works often tend to glorious embellishment - to be found even in the
writings of such a sober prehistorian as the Abbe Breuil himself, who once referred to the
Petershohle as a Paleolithic "tabernacle." In Abel's description of the Drachenloch there were
"several stone chests," each containing four to five bear skulls, and there also were "numerous
stone and bone artifacts" together with the bear remains, although in fact no flints at all were
found. All this, according to Abel, proves that "during the Mousterian period in Central
Europe, the killing of bears was accompanied by skull and long bone sacrifices."
The most trivial occurrences have been cited as evidence for the cult of the cave bear. It is
known, for instance, that certain Siberian tribes reverence the bear and, among other things,
extract certain teeth from the skulls. Thus the find of a cave bear skull without incisor and
canine teeth may well bring to a mind sufficiently prepared by ardent belief the conviction
that this is a Neandertal parallel to the modern practice. If you come with such an argument to
a museum curator, the best you can hope for is a sad smile; he will have profound knowledge
of the ease with which certain teeth tend to drop out of drying skulls.
The bear feast of the Lapps, often mentioned in discussions of bear cults, was a hunting rite,
not a sacrifice. After the ceremonial eating of the bear, the bones were buried, generally with
at least the skull and some other bones in approximately correct position. Many such bear
graves have been found, but they show no resemblance to the Alpine bear caves.
I believe that we must conclude, with Koby, that there is no real evidence for a cave bear cult
among the Neandertal men who inhabited Europe in the last interglaical and the earlier part of
the last glaciation. There may have been a bear cult-but we have no proof. It is the more to be
regretted that the Drachenloch structures, whatever they were, were not properly documented,
by means of photography, detailed plans, and so on.
When we come to the time of modern man in Europe - from about 35,000 B.P. to the end of
the Ice Age some 10,000 B.P. - the evidence is somewhat better. And yet it does not tell us as
much as we might hope, or as much as some students have claimed.
The art of Paleolithic man is often thought to have religious significance. It is generally
agreed that this art dates from the latter half of the last glaciation, when Europe was inhabited
by men of modern type Cro-Magnon man and his successors. We find the remains of such
peoples associated with a sequence of Late Paleolithic cultures, many of which excel in the
arts of painting, engraving, and sculpture. Most of the pictures represent animals, and the
majority are game animals of the type that would have been important in the economy of
those hunting tribes-the bison, the wild ox, the ibex, the red deer, the reindeer, the horse, the
mammoth, and so on.
A few large carnivores are also shown - they were probably seen as rivals or enemies rather
than as game. The relationship between these two categories in the famous painted cave of
Lascaux in Dordogne, France, is typical: there are more than 200 figures showing game
animals, but only 6 or 7 lions and I bear. Altogether, there are about 100 bear representations
in Paleolithic art.
Moreover, when we look in detail at the bear pictures, it seems that most of them probably
represent the living species Ursus arctos -the brown bear- and not the cave bear at all. To be
sure, it is not easy to tell which species is meant, when they are so closely related as the
brown bear and the cave bear, and moreover we do not know exactly what the cave bear
looked like in life. In addition, we have no guarantee that the cave artists were concerned with
exact realism (on the contrary, there is even one case of what seems to be a bear with the tail
of a wolf).
One of the finest bear pictures comes from the cave of Teyjat in Dordogne. The animal
certainly looks very like a brown bear. Although the head is well rounded, the limbs are
relatively long and slim. The same species probably is represented by a very peculiar
engraving in the cave of Trois-Freres in Ariege, France. This bear, according to Count
Begouen and the Abbe Breuil, seems to be vomiting its blood, and there are various signs on
its body, some of them perhaps representing spears or other projectiles. The bear's flat and
low head profile apparently proclaim it a brown bear and not a cave bear.
Paleolithic engraving of a bear, probably Ursus arctos, from the cave of Teyjat in Dordogne,
France. After Koby.
Another engraving, probably of the brown bear (Ursus arctos), from Trois Freres cave, in
Ariege, France. It has been regarded as a bear wounded by spears and vomiting blood. After
Koby.
Similar characters are seen in various other bear pictures, such as a painting in black pigment
from a cave by Santimamifie near Santander in northern Spain; two profile heads, one from
Lascaux and one from La Madeleine, Dordogne; and a figurine from the Isturits Cave in the
Pyrenees. There is no reason to regard any of these as anything else than brown bear.
Two loose slabs from the cave La Colombiere in Ain, France, have engravings showing bears.
One of them shows only the head, which has a rounded profile and an almost piglike snout.
This may be a cave bear, as Abel suggests, but the evidence is hardly conclusive. The other
slab shows the entire animal; the head is rather similar, but the limbs are fairly long and
slender. Another creature of about the same type was depicted on a rock slab from Massat in
Ariege. The chances are that all of these, too, are brown bears.
Head of a bear, engraved on a slab found in the cave La Colombiere, in Ain, France. The
shape of the muzzle and forehead suggested to Abel that it might be a cave bear. After Abel.
Finally, there is a remarkable engraving from the Combarelles Cave in Dordogne. It shows a
very stocky, heavily built bear with short, powerful limbs, a hanging, vaulted head - all of
these being characters that apparently distinguished the cave bear. The bear's snout is well
developed and does not exhibit the pug-dog type ascribed by some students to this species,
but, as was noted in chapter 1, we do not have to assume such a trait. And so the bear from
Les Combarelles may, perhaps, be an eyewitness portrait of the extinct cave bear. On the
other hand, we can not be absolutely sure that it does not represent a very large, fat, brown
bear!
Engraving from Les Combarelles, in Dordogne, France, possibly showing a cave bear (Ursus
spelaeus). After Koby.
The Les Combarelles bear is shown moving slowly ahead, or possibly lying dead on its right
side. There are curving lines over the body which may, or may not, represent spears. The cave
paintings were long interpreted as works of so-called sympathetic magic: by drawing an
animal, especially one with a spear in it, a hunter gained influence over the real animal and
ensured a successful hunt. It is still being done. You take a photograph of some one you hate,
stick needles in it, and expect the victim to die.
But, as has been pointed out by Peter J. Ucko and André Rosenfeld, for example, this is only
one of numerous possible interpretations of cave art, and there is little reason to prefer it,
especially since very few animals are actually' shown- wounded or in association with spears
and the like. Alexander Marshack has found that many of the cave engravings were remade
numerous times, apparently by different people. A ritual is indeed suggested, but its meaning
is still unknown.
Probably the most remarkable art object in this connection is a headless clay sculpture of a
bear found in 1923 by the intrepid speleologist Norbert Casteret in the cave of Montespan in
the French Pyrenees. This is a life-size model, some two feet high (0.6 meters) and almost
four feet long (1.2 meters) representing a massively proportioned bear, lying down on its
belly. It is thought to have been originally covered by the skin of a bear, with the head fixed in
its proper place by a wooden stick. The sculpture is riddled by spear marks, so it presumably
was used for a ritual, perhaps of the sympathetic-magic type. M. Casteret and his assistant
Henri Godin found the skull of a young bear between the forepaws of the sculpture. They
knew that examination of the skull by a specialist would reveal which species was the object
of this ritual.
An amazing similarity exists

between bear ceremonies performed
some 20,000 years ago during the
Madelanian, and the Gilyak festivals
from our own era. Deep in the
interior of the Montespan cave
(Houte-Garronne) Count Begouen
discovered the headless clay figure
of a bear. Between its forepaws lay
the fallen skull of a real bear which
had once been attached to the figure
itself. Thirty or so deep circular
holes visible on the sculpture are
assumed to be traces of spears or
arrows used in the bear ceremony of
20,000 years ago. A bear skull found
nearby has unfortunately been lost.
Photo: Lissner - Man, God and

Magic
In a letter of August 17, 1974, M. Casteret tells of the fate of this skull, discovered more than
fifty years earlier. He left it in place to be viewed by the experts (the Abbe Breuil, Dr.
Capitan, Count Begouen, and Miss Garrod) who were immediately summoned to the
Montespan cave. In the intervening two days, a small channel was dug to drain the inner part
of the cave, which was flooded. But on returning to the statue, M. Casteret and the invited
experts were startled to find the skull gone - stolen! So this skull, seen only by Casteret and
Godin, was lost to science, and we shall probably never know which kind of bear was
involved in the ritual of Montespan.
Although there is no confirmation of a cave bear cult, at least we may assume that the species
was well known to early men - Neandertal men and, after them, Cro-Magnon men-who lived
at the same time. We know that the brown bear and the grizzly bear have been assiduously
hunted in modern times, even to their extermination in many areas. Did early man hunt the
cave bear too?
The idea that there were tribes specialized in the hunting of cave bears, and that they were
responsible for at least some of the accumulations of bear remains in caves, crops up from
time to time. Professor Lothar F. Zotz even speaks of a bear-hunting phase in the economy of
early man. An amibitious attempt to characterize such man-made assemblages was made by
Heinz Bachler, the son of Emil Bachler. On the basis of a careful analysis of isolated teeth, he
was able to show certain differences in the age structures of the bear populations of different
caves. In some caves, the number of cubs and young animals was especially high, and these
he interpreted as bear-hunting stations; for, no doubt, early man would have found the
immature bears easier to kill than the adult.
There are several reasons to reject the suggestion of specialized bear-hunting tribes. In the
first place, the high phosphate content of the bear cave earth proves that many of the animals
were left to rot on the spot and were not eaten. Phosphate is also formed in caves settled by
man, but the content is much lower. As to the large number of young found in most caves, this
is only to be expected from natural mortality, which strikes most heavily at the immature and
the aged.
Then, there are very few, if any, stone implements in most bear caves. Any prolonged
settlement by Paleolithic man tends to be marked by the sprinkling of innumerable flint
flakes. The skinning and cutting up of a killed bear is quite an undertaking, and in the process
more than one flint implement is likely to be damaged and discarded. There should also be
butchering cuts on the bones. But the marks that are actually found, are either haphazard
breaks due evidently to "dry transport" and the like, or marks left by scavengers and gnawing
animals. Broken - up long bones have been thought to show that man broke them to get the
marrow out, but the long bones of a bear do not have an easily extracted marrow like those of
an ox or sheep. The hyena can utilize the nutriment concealed in the bone of a bear, by
smashing it and eating it as such, but this is beyond man.
In the typical bear cave, there are also lots of shed milk teeth, in which the roots have been
resorbed. This proves that young bears were hibernating peacefully in the cave at the time, for
such teeth came from living bears, not from dead.
Many caves also show other mementos of the presence of bears. Scratch marks and footprints
occasionally. occur, but of course do not necessarily prove that the cave was visited more than
a few times. The so - called Barenschliffe ('Bearpolish') tell a very different story. They are
found in narrow passages, on the ceiling or the walls, and sometimes on loose slabs that are
now found embedded in the cave earth but which once formed part of the ceiling or wall.
They are surfaces polished to a mirror like sheen by the passage of innumerable bears during
hundreds or thousands of years. Few things speak more eloquently of the vastness of
geological time and the cumulative numbers of living beings that have trodden one and the
same path than these bear - polished limestones.
The big bones of the cave bear may well have been useful to man as implements. A thighbone
would have made a splendid club, and a mandible with the canine tooth remaining could have
been used as a scraping or digging tool. But there is little evidence of the actual use of cave
bear bones. The wear marks found on the cave bear teeth are natural ones, brought about by
the bear itself when it was still alive. Sometimes, pieces of bone show a polish of the same
type as the Barenschliffe and very likely due to similar causes: partly embedded in matrix, the
exposed part of the bone was worn by animals swishing by.
Some of the big canine teeth of the cave bear actually wore down in such a peculiar manner
that unwary students have been led completely astray. One type of wear tends finally to
weaken the tooth so much that its outer part breaks off and is lost. That discarded tooth
fragment looks so much like a knife blade, well polished by use, that it was once described as
the "Kiskevely knife" (after a Hungarian site of that name), supposedly of human
manufacture. It was Koby who presented the true explanation of this odd pseudoimplement.
In stories about the Ice Age, the cave bear is generally depicted as a comparatively easy prey,
in spite of its great size. In contrast, the brown bear is thought to have been much respected
and avoided. There are various restorations and accounts of the supposed methods of cave
bear hunting.
Perhaps the most vivid account is that given by Othenio Abel, who speculated about the
manner in which Ice Age man might have hunted the bear of the Mixnitz Dragon Cave. He
suggested that the hunters might have found it advantageous to arrange an ambush inside the
cave, while the bear was away. When the bear finally appeared, it was killed or stunned by a
rapid hit over the nose. The important thing (averred Bachofen-Echt) was to damage certain
nerves, thus producing instant paralysis. As a medical man Koby immediately branded this a
tall story: damage to t olfactory nerves, which are the only important nerves in the area, will
produce neither paralysis nor instant death.
The hunter being right-handed, the ensuing damage to the skull of the clubbed bear should be
found on the left side. Other accounts of cave bear hunting also stress damage to the left side
of the skulls of wounded bears. However, of the skulls from the Mixnitz cave, six are
damaged on the left side, sixteen on both sides, and one on the right; incidentally, all of the
skulls probably were damaged after death. Two skulls show partially healed lesions that were
caused during life, but whether they were caused by a weapon wielded by man, by rockfall
from the ceiling of the cave, or by some other agency, would be difficult to decide.
A celebrated find from the Sloup Cave in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, was published by
Jindrich Wankel in 1892. Wankel found the top part of a skull (probably, but not certainly,
that of a cave bear), with a partially healed lesion. Some hours after the finding of the skull,
two workmen discovered a flint piece in the same part of the cave. Could this have been part
of the weapon that caused the lesion and then stuck in the head of the bear, finally to be
dislodged after the bear had died and its flesh disintegrated? Unfortunately, the flint piece
does not look much like any sort of projectile point, least of all like the Solutrean laurel point
shown in Wankel's figure.
It is not uncommon to find a bear skull with peculiar lesions on top of the head. Are we to
assume that Neandertal man when wishing to kill a bear, habitually took a swipe at the top of
its head? Let us not underestimate the intelligence and professional knowledge of these early
men, who lived by hunting and assuredly knew all there was to know about the effects of their
arms. You can kill a man by hitting him over the head, but to kill a bear that way, and
particularly a cave bear with its immense sinus cavities, would call for more than superhuman
strength. In fact, some of the lesions found on cave bear skulls are probably due to rockfall,
while others point to inflammations with resulting osteolysis - the bone is "eaten away".
Sectioned cave bear skull, showing

the nasal cavity, the large air sinuses
in the upper part of the skull, and the
comparatively small braincase well
down in the hind part of the skull.
Redrawn after Koby and Schaefer.
Photo: (adapted from) Lissner - Man,

God and Magic
So the various accounts showing holes in the tops of bear skulls and the attempts to fit flint
weapons or bone clubs into these holes, seem somewhat futile. Neandertal man, who did not
know the bow and arrow, would perforce have to choose between the bludgeon and the spear.
Not much deliberation was needed to make the right choice when a bear hunt was in the
offing.
There are, of course, other methods of hunting that may have been known to Neandertal man.
Camouflaged pit traps were probably used to catch large game, which could then be killed
with spears or by throwing rocks. Such traps are, however, difficult to make in the hilly or
mountainous regions inhabited by the cave bear, and we have found no evidence of them
there.
Broadly, three types of caves containing cave bear remains can be distinguished. The first is
the exclusive bear cave, like most of those discussed here-the Drachenloch, the
Wildenmannisloch, the Mixnitz cave, and so on - where most or all fossils are remains of the
cave bear, and only a few traces of man are found. Such caves are known from the Pyrenees,
the Alps, and further east into the Caucasus.
A second group consists of the caves that were settled intermittently by man and by bears in
the intervals between human occupancy. There are numerous examples of these, too, a good
one being the Akhshtyrskaya Cave in the Caucasus, on the right bank of the Mzymta River.
Located about 330 feet (one hundred meters) above the present-day river bed, it was
intermittently inhabited by man over several millennia, beginning with early Mousterian times
and going on to historical times. But there were also long intervals when the cave was
forgotten by man and was used by bears and bats. There are many caves of this type, for
instance the Veternica Cave not far from the city of Zagreb in Croatia, Yugoslavia, and the
classical cave of Gailenreuth by Muggendorf in Franconia, Germany.
The third type of bear cave is the true hunter station, in which most or all of the bones present
were brought in by man. Cave bear bones may be found in these caves too, but they are very
rare and are completely overshadowed by the bones of characteristic game animals. Again,
the history of the Caucasus as set forth by the paleontologist N. K. Vereshchagin, gives us a
typical example of the hunter - station cave in the Sakazhia Cave in western Transcaucasia.
This cave was inhabited by Upper Paleolithic men who left behind thousands of flint tools and
fragments belonging to the Solutrean culture tradition.
Among the animal bones found in the cave, those of bison predominate greatly; there are
1,488 bison bones, and they must represent at least 32 individuals. The number of cave bear
bones, in contrast, is only 35, and no more than 5 individuals are represented. These bones
may, perhaps, be spoils of the hunt and the same may be true for the remains of at least 3
brown bears found at the same site.
A site that does not quite fit into any one of these categories is Erd, in Hungary, which is an
open - air Mousterian hunting station. As in typical bear caves, some 90 percent of the bones
are from the cave bear. There are also horse, woolly rhino, and other game animals, but of the
latter animals almost only skull and limb bones were found, while the bear skeletons are
represented in their entirety. This indicates that the bears died, or were killed, on the spot,
while the other animals had been killed elsewhere, and selected parts brought in.
Reconstructe
d skeletons of
a female
(white) and a
male (black
silhouette)
Florida cave
bear,
Tremarctos
floridanus.
The sexual
dimorphism
in size is
somewhat
enhanced by
the fact that
the female is
smaller than
average,
while the
male is a
particularly
large
specimen.
After Kurten.
Photo: Bjorn
Kurten, 1976,
'The Cave
Bear Story'
The Andean bear of South America, Tremarctos ornatus, is the last survivor of a great tribe of
bears that ranged widely through the Americas in Pleistocene times. A closely related species
was the Florida cave bear, Tremarctosfloridanus, whose remains have been found in Mexico
and the southern United State s-California, New Mexico, Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, and
especially Florida. Although many of the finds come from caves, there are no mass
occurrences like those of the European cave bear, or even the Cumberland black bears, and so
the name might seem ill chosen. But there is a point to it. The bodily resemblance of this
American species to the European cave bear is almost uncanny.
Of course there are differences. Anatomical details make it clear that the Florida cave bear
was closely related to the living Andean bear, and their connection with the Ursus bears is
certainly rather distant. Yet evolution, working with such different raw materials, brought
forth a creature mirroring the European form in some of its most conspicuous features.
The Florida cave bear was a big animal. The weight of a large male has been estimated at
some 650 pounds (upwards of 300 kilograms), while the much smaller female weighed about
half as much. It was very heavily built, with a barrellike rib cage, short, broad paws and
elongated upper arm and thigh bones. The anterior premolars were reduced, the back teeth
enlarged, and the jaw articulation shifted well above the plane of the teeth. The profile of the
forehead shows a distinct step. The neck was lengthened, the back sloping, and the
hindquarters were relatively weak.
Skull of a brown bear, Ursus

arctos, from the Peking Man
site of Choukoutien, China.
The enormous size of the
skull led to its erroneous
identification as that of a
cave bear. After Pei.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976,

'The Cave Bear Story'
In North America, except Alaska, the grizzly bear - which is the local form of the species
Ursus arctos - is a rather late immigrant. During the last glaciation, the way south from Alaska
was barred by an enormous ice field extending all the way from ocean to ocean. Towards the
end of the glaciation, the ice melted and an ice-free corridor was formed through which
animals (including man and the bear) could migrate south. But although the grizzly appears at
various open-air sites in North America, including the famous tar pits of Rancho La Brea in
Los Angeles, California, it is not present in caves.
The black bears, to judge from their fossil record, are somewhat more prone to cave-denning
than the brown and grizzly bears.
The American black bear, Ursus americanus, resembles its Asiatic cousin in its selection of
hibernation places. Fossils of this species are often found in caves, and there may even be
mass occurrences that almost bring the European bear cave to mind. The great collection from
Cumberland Cave, in Maryland, represents at least thirty or forty individuals, but the actual
number probably was much greater. Bears of all age groups are found there, showing that the
animals actually inhabited the cave. Other American caves with large numbers of black bear
fossils are Conard Fissure near Buffalo River, Arkansas, and Potter Creek Cave in Shasta
County, California. The last-mentioned dates from the last glaciation, while the Cumberland
and Conard bears lived in mid-Pleistocene times.
Profile of deposits in the Pod hradem bear cave, Moravia, Czechoslovakia, with the
distribution of cave bear bones in the cave earth; each dot represents one specimen(!) Cave
bear bones were found at all levels in the Pleistocene deposits of the cave; only those deposits
formed after the Ice Age (upper-most layers) lack the cave bear. After Musil.

Life Table for the Cave Bear (Ursus spelaeus)
Population from Odessa
From: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
x dx lx I000 qx ex
Age Deaths Living at Rate of Expectation
Interval During Beginning of Mortality of Life
Interval Interval
0-0.5 191 1000 191 3.47
0.5-1.5 309 809 382
1.5-2.5 113 500 227
2.5-3.5 76 387 198
3.5-4.5 59 311 189
4.5-5.5 39 252 155 5.1
5.5-6.5 30 213 141
6.5-7.5 25 183 136
7.5-8.5 21 158 134
8.5-9.5 18 137 131
9.5-10.5 18 119 151 4.2
10.5-11.5 16 101 158
11.5-12.5 18 85 212
12.5-13.5 18 67 269
13.5-14.5 17 49 347
14.5-15.5 13 32 407 1.5

15.5-16.5 9 19 474
16.5-17.5 6 10 600
17.5-18.5 4 4 1000
The life table above (see Deevey, 1947) summarizes the fate of a "cohort" of individuals who
start life together. For regular intervals of age, it gives the number of deaths, the number of
survivors, the rate of mortality, and the expectation of life (or mean remaining lifetime).
These columns are headed x, dx, I., q, and ex, respectively (1000 qx indicates that the rate of
mortality is given on a per mil basis).
The life table for the cave bear is given with one-year intervals, except for the first interval
which is only 0.5 year. It was constructed by calculating, for each age interval, the ratio qx =
a/(a + b), in which a is the total number of teeth belonging to the given interval, and b the sum
total of all older teeth. Original values of qx for the intervals between 4.5 and 15.5 years were
somewhat irregular and have been smoothed by the use of sliding means for three consecutive
years. The expectation of life was only calculated for every fifth year. Age determinations
over 5.5 years are approximate and preliminary. The table is an emended version of one
published in Kurten (1958).
The table shows that rates of mortality are high in the first few years of life, and that only
about one cub in 4 survived to adult age. The rate of mortality is gradually reduced and tends
to fluctuate somewhat below 15 percent annually in middle life.
After about 12 years of age the rates again increase as senility sets in (probably mainly due to
wearing out of the dentition). The expectation of life at birth is only about 3.5 years but rises
to over 5 years in the young adult, then gradually to diminish with increasing age.
The age structure of the cave bear population may be compared with that of the Yellowstone
grizzly bear, for which Craighead et al (1974) have constructed a 9-year average. The
comparison is made in the second table. As may be noted, the sets of figures for the two
populations run closely parallel to each other, but the relative number of adults is lower in the
cave bear population. This is probably, in part at least, a real difference, and due to a
difference in the potential longevity of the two species. Of course, it may also reflect a certain
bias in the cave bear sample from Odessa. Such a bias could arise if adult skulls and jaws
were used for exchange or as gifts.
Age structures of cave bear (Ursus spelaeus, Odessa) and

grizzly bear (Ursus arctos, Yellowstone Park)
(Data for ursus arctos from Craighead et al., 1974)

Percentages of: Cave Bear Grizzly Bear
Cubs 23.5 18.6
Yearlings 14.5 13
2-year-olds 11.3 10.2
3-4 year-olds 16.4 14.7
Adults 34.2 43.7
Diseases and other causes of death for Cave Bears
Many cave bears clearly suffered from osteoarthritis. This disease often produced arthritic
outgrowths of bone, so-called exostoses, sometimes of fantastic appearance. Vertebrae,or
limb bones often fused together into a single mass of bone that must have made its b earer
more or less lame.
Rickets was another common malady, which was related to the feeding habits of the bears and
probably also to their long sojourns in dark caves without sunshine. As Ehrenberg noted,
evidence of this disease is particularly common in high Alpine caves such as the Dachstein
cave at 7,200 feet (2,200 meters above sea level); it is less common in the Mixnitz cave, 3,300
feet (1,000 meters above sea level); and almost unknown in the Winden bear cave at an
elevation of only about 520 feet (160 meters). The length of hibernation, he suggested, is
directly related to the altitude of the site: the higher the cave, the shorter the summer season.
Other infirmities seem to be due to the heavy use of various organs. Ehrenberg noted many
cases of exostoses on the forearm bones due to inflammations in ruptured muscles, tendons,
or periosteum (the lining of the bone); these cases show the entire scale from healthy
specimens to severely damaged ones. Heavy wear of the teeth led to exposure of the roots and
pulp cavities with resulting festering. Caries has been observed in some cave bear teeth.
Koby has noted that the great frontal sinuses of the cave bear skull were prone to infections
resulting in osteolysis-an eating away of the bone that produces perforations; such
perforations have irregularly rounded, smooth borders and so are easy to distinguish from
lesions brought about by mechanical damage. Koby thought they might have resulted from an
attack of parasitic worms, as is the case in ferrets and some other members of the weasel
family.
Still another group of diseases arose from mechanical damage due to accidents, blows, bites,
and the like. Healed fractures are often found among cave bear fossils, for instance broken
limb bones that have reknit at odd angles; bears thus afflicted were permanently crippled.
There are even several instances of the os penis, or baculum, having been broken and reknit.
In bears, a fracture of the penis bone is not necessarily fatal for the urethra is not encased in
the bone as it is in dogs.
Broken teeth, especially canines, are a common sight.
It should be noted that most bears spent the winter in caves, but did not use them much at
other times, except for those bears which were sick or defenseless. The bears which died in
the caves usually did so in winter because of injuries or disease which prevented them from
laying down sufficient fat stores in their bodies in the summer to carry them through the
winter. In the case of bear cubs, they died if their mother succumbed while they were still
feeding from her, or she died while they were dependent in other ways on her to find them
food or to offer protection from predators.
Ivar Lissner continues: It is true, of course, that the struggle for existence cannot be
maintained indefinitely by brute force alone, and that is probably the reason for the dying out
of the cave bear, a gigantic and excessively heavy creature which ultimately found itself with
no enemies save man and may have become extinct because of a lack of natural selection.
Some day the brown bear and the grizzly will also roam the burial grounds of the taiga for the
last time, lay themselves down in some lonely cave and send their souls winging to the stars.
The Kodiak Bear, thought by most to be the largest

bear - Ursus arctos middendorffi
Photo:
http://lsb.syr.edu/projects/cyberzoo/kodiakbear.html
Bears are strange animals, and often act in such a human way that one is tempted to credit
them with a considerable reasoning power. They hoard their food in the ground and establish
caches of provisions. Sometimes they dig up a dead animal, carry it to another place and bury
it again - and they never seem to forget the spot. Being relatively slow - moving, they can
prey only on small animals, carrion and fish. The bear is however an excellent swimmer and
fisherman. Apart from live prey, the bear also eats plants, being especially fond of berries,
mushrooms and acorns. And bears especially love honey. No tree is too high or cliff too steep
to climb if a honey comb is at stake.
Generally speaking, bears do not attack human beings unless their own lives are in danger.
They can scent man from so far that it is almost impossible to stalk and intercept them. One
can come across fresh tracks or find heaps of dung still steaming in the cool gray light of
dawn, but the bear's unrivalled sense of smell will have warned him of one's approach in
ample time. By nature cautious and wary, he generally regards discretion as the, better part of
valour. Oration women going unarmed into the depths of the bush to collect bilberries often
hear the snorting and grunting of a bear enjoying a snack of the same forest fruit. Tungus girls
seldom show any alarm at the approach of a bear, well knowing that his sole motive is to steal
the fruit which they have already gathered. Accordingly, they either gather up their things and
move on or shout at the animal to scare him away.
Mother bears with young, on the other hand, are aggressive and nervous, constantly on their
guard and easily aroused. In my experience, they are more dangerous when they sense a
danger which they cannot recognise than when they can hear and see it distinctly. Bear cubs
are blind and remarkably tiny when they arrive in the world. They are usually born in January,
after a gestation period of seven months, and by spring are able to accompany their mother on
journeys in quest of food. Even at this stage if a she - bear is attacked or one of her cubs
wounded or killed she will try to come to grips with her adversary.
When Tungus are not actually hunting bear and only want to drive them away, they wave
their spears, bang guns or pieces of wood against a tree, and shout at the top of their voices.
Even females generally pay attention to this warning and retreat without attacking.
It is extraordinarily difficult to kill bear, for they will often stop several bullets with scarcely a
blink. I heard of one bear in the taiga who took thirteen bullets in the body and still showed
fight. A bear is truly vulnerable, especially to primitive weapons, only when he rears. As a
rule, however, he only rises to his feet at the last moment, when he gets to close quarters in
order to strike with his forepaws, so the Orochi encourage him to rear prematurely by jumping
and waving their arms in the air.
An Orochon in hunting garb. The Orochon are b
and hunters of reindeer whose nomadic cultu
economy are based entirely on that animal. Eve
name reflects this. On the left is an old musket,
right a palma, the wooden shaft surmounted by
with which the Orochon formerly hunted
Photo: Lissner - Man, God and Magic
In former times, the Orochi used to hunt bear with the palma, an extremely dangerous
undertaking because the spear had to be thrust into the animal's heart from close quarters. The
procedure was to induce the bear to rear and, when he came to grips, level the spear at his
heart so that he ran onto it. What made things even more difficult was that the palma had to be
kept out of sight until the decisive blow was struck because a bear was always capable of
brushing it aside with his forepaw at the last moment.
Some Siberian tribes used to tackle bear with knives. The hunter's left arm and hand were
thickly swathed, while his right hand held the weapon, a long blade. This method resembled
that used by gladiators in Roman arenas. Lastly, bear were also hunted with the axe, though to
lay one of these primeval giants low with such a weapon was an art in which the chances of
survival were never more than fifty-fifty. Even when the Orochi did possess firearms they
were so old and unreliable that many men never returned from bear hunts.
The bear senses everything, hears everything, knows the activities and intentions of human
beings and, above all, remembers everything. All Tungus, believe him to possess uncannily
fine instincts. In fact, the bear's scent and hearing are much more highly developed than his
eyesight, which is why, when the Tungus are asked how a bear knows when he has met you
once before, they answer: 'He smells it.' It is quite astonishing how surely the bear can scent
things from a great distance. He can spot the presence of an enemy or the slightest change in
his hunting preserves, which he knows down to the last detail. His scent and hearing endow
him with powers of observation so acute that he invariably reacts quickly to human intentions.
When he is hunted he only shows himself at night and always keeps close to cover. When he
is well treated, as in the United States' national parks, he becomes extraordinarily trustful.
Two bisected skulls, one of the brown bear

(above) and the other of the extinct cave
bear (below). Comparison shows how
powerful the cave bear was, how
impressive his olfactory equipment and
how acute his sense of smell. Seventy
thousand years old but complete in every
detail, this skull has aroused the admiration
of many zoologists.
The question of whether a particular bear has encountered a hunter on some previous occasion
is considered extremely important by the Tungus. They insist that the animal knows when a
man has harboured evil designs against a bear or has already been attacked or touched by one,
and believe that it will make a point of attacking him. Hence, it is better not to go hunting
with such a man. Objects which have been touched by a bear can also be dangerous, so
Tungus avoid coming into contact with them. Once a hunter has killed a bear he would be
better advised never to hunt another. All this is a symptom of the widespread fear of natural
vengeance which the Tungus have passed on to the Siberian Russians. The converse applies,
too. Anyone who is on good terms with bears will seldom be harmed by them, and the
inhabitants of Siberia can tell countless stories of grateful bears who have repaid one good
turn with another.
When a bear dies the soul leaves its body and is then capable of harming the soul of a man
just as any liberated soul can. A bear's soul must therefore be treated in a proper manner and
its meat eaten in a strictly prescribed fashion - above all, not in the presence of women. It is
exceedingly important to keep the bones to one side so that the bear's skeleton can be
deposited in a tree or laid out on a platform high above the ground.
No bones must be missing, or the bear's soul will never rest. The head is cut off and either laid
on a slab of wood supported by posts or hung up in a tree. Many Tungus, though not the
Orochi, hang the whole skin up in the forest. Since the bear's soul is carefully watching all
this, it is advisable to talk loudly of its maltreatment by some distant tribe so as to delude it
and ensure that it will not persecute its real murderers. Live bears are especially dangerous
because they can hear and scent everything. Consequently, the Orochi never speak openly of a
particular animal which they have seen or whose hiding place they have discovered. As a
general rule, all talk about a bear which one intends to kill should be avoided, and if a Tungus
finds a cave or lair in the rocks he does his best to indicate it to the others by means of
gestures alone.
I never heard the Orochi describe bear in any but circumlocutionary terms such as 'the black
one,' 'the ugly one ... .. the honourable one,' 'grandfather,' 'grandmother' or 'big baby.' When
they see a bear emerge suddenly from the undergrowth, they call: 'Go back where you came
from. We shall do you no harm.' The Tungus believe that 'the honourable one' thinks like a
man, and when one sees this morose and incalculable creature with its half - open jaws and
lolling tongue sitting manlike on a fallen trunk and calmly regarding its foe, one is tempted to
agree.
More legends and anecdotes are told about the bear than about any other animal in the
Siberian forests. No other animal has so much power, even when it is dead and its soul has
left its body. Its paws, claws and teeth are all regarded as talismans with tutelary properties.
The people of eastern Asia are familiar with countless medicaments made from various parts
of the bear's body, and anyone who visits an apothecary in the Far East will discover how
expensive these exotic remedies can be.
Page 159
We discovered that, even in the snow-covered tundras of Northern Siberia and Northern
Canada and on the most inhospitable coasts of the Arctic Ocean, an avowedly monotheistic
religion was embraced with reverential faith and a warm heart by the peoples who had been
there longest. Especially prominent among the sacrifices offered to the Supreme Being are the
skulls and bones of slaughtered game, because they thereby acknowledged God as absolute
master of their sustenance and, with it, of life and death.
P. W. SCHMIDT, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, Vol. III, P. 563
WHY is bear medicine of such great value? All the Tungus of Northern Asia, the Manchurian
Chinese, the Buryats, the Mongols, the Koreans and all the inhabitants of China set great store
by medicaments which have been prepared from various parts or organs of the bear's body.
The only things held in comparable esteem are the tiger, the young antlers of the isyubr deer,
known as panty, and the root of the ginseng plant. The idea that curative effects can be
derived from the strength of a bear or tiger or the vitality of a deer's antlers is something
which originated in a hunter's world such as that of the Tungus. That is why the shamans of
some Tungus tribes wear a head-dress of stag's antlers when performing rituals, while others
model their clothing on the bear's external appearance. Whether dried bear's gall ground into a
powder and mixed with water is a genuinely effective remedy for inflammation of the eyes,
and whether it originated in the Chinese or Tungus' store of medical experience is something I
was unable to establish conclusively.
The roots of the ginseng plant which grows in the forests of the Russian province of
Primor'ye, North Korea and Manchuria, bears a remarkable resemblance to a human being. As
we have already seen, a skinned bear is also reminiscent of a human being, so it is evident that
the Tungus regard both plant and animal as possessing a soul very like that of a man. In fact,
they speak to both of them as though they were addressing human beings.
The Tungus talk to all animals, plants and natural phenomena, it is true, but their relationship
to the ginseng plant and the bear is more personal, stronger and more active. It is a mixture of
sometimes genuine and sometimes feigned affection and solicitude, respect and awe.
The ancient Finns believed that a human soul resided in the bear. Professor Kaarle Krohn of
Helsinki writes of the songs which the Finns sang when feasting off a bear's head and
ceremonially depositing its skull in a sacred tree. 'O God, thou who has given what is not to
be eaten without song and whose head must be laid in a tree.' The most valuable and
efficacious parts of a bear are its head, skull and leg bones. Since a bear's skull contains the
most tasty part of the animal -its brains- and since the leg bones contain the delicious marrow,
the Tungus have always, from very early times, sacrificed them to their god. When I
questioned some Orochi and Manega about this, they said that they always buried a bear's
skeleton to pacify the animal's soul but that it was an age-old tradition to place the skull of a
slaughtered bear in a tree as a sacrifice to the supreme god. The practice of laying out the
skeleton on a platform above ground was a form of burial, but the exposure of the head must
have been a form of sacrifice. The Tungus are quite explicit about this, even today, when they
owe allegiance less to a supreme god than to a 'lord of the forest and mountain.'
This was not always so. The lord of the forest only gained in importance as the age-old faith
in a single supreme god declined. The fact that the ancient custom of sacrificing a bear's head,
skull and leg bones is no longer observed and is even sinking slowly into oblivion is just one
of the many symptoms of a dying race. First, the ancient faith vanishes, and with the waning
of a belief in God, which among the Tungus was a belief in a single supreme deity, comes the
disappearance of the conviction that Heaven sustains and protects its own. Waning faith is
linked with the decline of a culture and ultimately of the men who sustained it.
The Tungus call God 'Boa.' At least, that is how the ancient name sounds when pronounced
by the Orochon, though Shirokogorov also writes 'Buga.' The Orochi call the Spirit of Heaven
'Dagachan.' It is hard to ascertain from them whether Dagachan and Boa are one and the
same, but all the Tungus who I met during my travels on the Manchurian side of the Amur
Bend still had an inherent knowledge or idea of the supreme being, the great God of the Sky.
This god remains eternally invisible and is aware of all that goes on in the world and the
universe. The Tungus have no conception of a God of Wrath. God has no Hell at his disposal
and could never banish a man to a place of purgatory or damnation. God is always kind,
always beneficent, and never punishes by dispensing evil. I even doubt whether the Tungus
would accept the suggestion that God sometimes takes away their luck at hunting, though
many authorities -Shirokogorov among them- assume them to believe that God punishes by
withholding His gifts.
Neither the Orochi nor the Manega have ever tried to portray their invisible supreme god in
visible terms. The strange little wooden figures which the Orochi and Manega carve on trees
or occasionally display on wooden altars are effigies of a forest spirit whom they call Bainaca.
Bainaca is lord of wild animals and holds the destinies of hunters in his hand, from which it
follows that God is not responsible for dispensing good or ill fortune where hunting is
concerned. The Tungus of the North Manchurian taiga offer small quantities of all kinds of
food to the spirit of the forest, putting aside a little of what they have prepared for a meal on a
small pedestal or framework of planks. There is a practical side to these offerings, too, for the
lonely traveller may use them to still his hunger in an emergency provided that he replaces
them at the next opportunity. This, at least, is how it was in northern Manchuria. The spirit of
the forest is a subordinate being and has no connection with the Tungus' high god, who is
invisible because he is one with the weather, the sky, the sun and the whole universe, and
because he alone stands above the mysteries of infinite space and infinite time, not subject to
these powers and therefore incapable of suffering harm or destruction by their agency.
Although Shirokogorov speaks of the Tungus' supreme god, Buyam, Boya or Boga, he
mentions nothing about the sacrifices made to him and refers only to the modest offerings set
aside for Bainaca: horsehairs, scraps of food and small birch twigs. The Orochi and Manega
both told me, however,that their fathers still practised the custom of sacrificing bears' heads to
the supreme god, wrapping them in birchbark and putting them high up in a tree or on a
wooden scaffold. This corresponds exactly with what the explorer T. W. Atkinson observed in
about 1860 on his journeys through the country surrounding the Upper and Lower Amur, and
also with descriptions given by the Russian ethnologist Miss M. A. Czaplicka, although in her
version the bear's bones were placed in a sack and hung up in a tree. As usual, the Tungus
were careful to see that no bones were missing.
The practice of sacrificing head, skull and leg bones was transmitted by the Samoyeds in the
west, via the northern Tungus, to the central Eskimos of North America. Apart from the
concept of sacrifice and of a single god, these races had three more things in common: they
were all reindeer breeders (or, in the case of the Eskimos, reindeer hunters); they all lived, as
some of them still do, in conical tents covered with reindeer hides or sheets of birchbark; and
they all, as Professor A. Gahs of Zagreb, an Austrian ethnologist, has stressed, used the bow
and arrow. The Danish ethnologist Birket-Smith writes:
'The cultural link between Northern Eurasia and North America is so close that the two parts
should be regarded as a single circumpolar cultural district in which a similar environment
forms the basis of common development. The test of human intelligence throughout the
Arctic and boreal regions is winter, and the vital problem in these regions is how winter can
be overcome.'
Professor Gahs has drawn an extremely interesting picture of divine worship in the Arctic
cultural area by compiling references to sacrifice from numerous different sources. We learn,
for instance that the Yurak Samoyeds built sacrificial mounds out of sticks, antlers, bear and
reindeer bones and, in particular, bear skulls on the Northern Siberian coast between Pechora
and Yenisei east of the southern tip of Novaya Zemlya and on the sacred island of Vaygach
and the Yamal Peninsula, which are formed by the Obskaya Guba and the Kara Sea. The
Swedish explorer Nils A. E. Nordenskjold discovered on the northwest coast of the Yamal
Peninsula an altar built of reindeer bones and about fifty bear skulls, some of which were
hung on sticks. Close by was a hearth containing the ashes of a recently extinguished fire, and
near it Nordenskjold saw numerous reindeer bones, clear evidence of a sacrificial feast, as he
noted in the report on his expedition to Novaya Zemlya and the Yeniseyskiy Gulf.
The Russian scholar B. Zitkov, describing a journey to the Yamal Peninsula in 1913, refers to
a sacrificial mound composed of polar bears' skulls. He learned that the Samoyeds had been
accumulating bears' skulls on this spot for over a hundred years. The Samoyeds' supreme
being is called 'Num,' and it was to this single deity that the skull sacrifices had been offered.
Like Boa, the god of the Orochi and the Tungus in general, the Samoyeds' high god is all
embracing. He is earth, sky, the whole of nature and the universe in its entirety. The fact that
the Samoyeds also recognise numerous spirits does not change their conception of Num as an
invisible being of unequalled sublimity who loves men and gives them good hunting by
dispatching spirits whom he has entrusted with its bestowal.
The Samoyeds are a fast dying race of whom little is known today. Let us take a last look at
these people who have for so long believed so implicitly in a single, supreme deity, who have
sacrificed to him, trusted him, relied on his omnipotence and, confident of his good will, have
carried their culture from one age to the next on swift sleighs which skim through the northern
forests and across the wintry grandeur of the wide tundra.
The Samoyeds' own name for themselves is Nyentsi, or 'men,' which is what the Russians call
them today. In Russian, Samoyedi means 'self-eater.' The Samoyeds have never been
cannibals, however, and it is very doubtful whether the name is Russian at all. It is more
probably of Finnish derivation and may be connected with the indigenous term for Lapland,
Sameandna, or that for Finland itself, Suomi.
The Samoyeds spend the whole of their life on the move and take all their possessions with
them: tents, sledges, boats and dogs. They harness three or four reindeer to each sledge, the
lead animal a little in front and the remainder behind in an oblique formation which looks
superb when the team is travelling at speed. Guided in this way, they traverse the gleaming
surface of the snow as lightly, swiftly and weightlessly as birds on the wing.
The sledges are small but as stoutly constructed as only the Eskimos, with their ancient store
of experience, can make them. Dogs are never harnessed to sledges but run alongside, pale
yellow, incredibly hardy animals who bark unceasingly and snap greedily at the raw fish
which forms their staple diet.
The Samoyeds themselves live on reindeer meat, although they never drink reindeer milk. A
Samoyed is really herdsman, hunter and fisherman all in one. Reindeer are the principal form
of capital, and the more head a man owns the happier he is. The northern herdsmen are
constantly preoccupied with a quest for better pasture, and this makes their life a wearisome
and arduous one. In spring and summer they move northward, in autumn and winter
southward, their whole existence spent in avoiding flies and finding the best grazing land,
keeping their herds together, counting them, cutting out sick animals and, last but not least,
protecting them from wolves, which are as much a menace in the tundra as in the taiga. So the
Samoyed skims along on his smooth gliding sled, controlling his herd with dogs, changing
their direction, catching animals with his sixty foot lasso and training them in the difficult art
of sledge pulling.
It is no simple matter to be herdsman, fisherman and hunter all at once. The Samoyed must be
able to construct tents, sledges, boats and fishing tackle; he must know a multitude of hunting
secrets, have countless tricks at his command, meet the perpetual severity of nature with a
degree of patience quite alien to Western cultures, possess superhuman powers of endurance
and be capable of withstanding plagues of insects and the harshest climate in the world. All
this presupposes a great, very ancient and time tested culture, and we can tell by studying
these people that the men who preceded Ur and Babylon and the beginning of our recorded
history were far from savages. Accustomed to the unceasing vicissitudes of fate, the Samoyed
never complains, never expects too much of life and is convinced that he must master it on his
own.
Page 167
He asks for help only in an emergency, repays a loan at the first opportunity, and has never
learned how to beg or steal.
We owe a great deal of what we know about this almost extinct race to the outstanding work
of the Finnish scholar T. Lehtisalo, who conducted an expedition to the Yurak Samoyeds of
northern Russia and northwest Siberia in the years 1911-1912. He travelled by water to the
estuary of the remote rivers Tass and Pur, accompanied reindeer breeders on a trip to the
Sjoida, carried out scientific research at Oksino in the Pechora Delta and spent days, weeks
and months with impoverished Samoyeds who, having already been robbed of their nomadic
liberty, were living in small villages. Then, in the year 1914, once more sponsored by the
Finno-Ugrian Society, he explored the domain of the Forest Yuraks on the Irtish. Lehtisalo
amassed a great deal of invaluable information about these Arctic people, and all that has
since come to light, even in very recent times, is merely a repetition of what he has already
told us.
The famous explorer De Dobbeler, who carried out exhaustive research into the Samoyeds in
about 1885, wrote:
'The Samoyeds believe in a Supreme God, the sky. He is good and, as such, will not do them
any harm. Since God is the sky and the sky is God, both are known by the same name: Num.
God is worshipped on sacred mountains. When the Samoyeds climb such a mountain after a
long journey they slaughter a reindeer, eat it and hang the animal's head either in a tree or on a
stake driven into the ground. Before throttling it, they look up at the sky and say: 'God, we
have led it hither,' and, when they have put the noose round its neck: 'Do you see, God, what
we are doing?' During the killing, they cry: 'O-ho-o-o-ho' and 'U-hu-u-u-u,' and after it they
say: 'God, take this.'
G. M. Vasilevich wrote in 1956 that the Yenisei Tungus look on the bear as a hero who
sacrificed himself in order to provide mankind with reindeer. In the extreme east of Siberia,
fragments have survived of a myth which tells how a girl gave birth to a bear cub and a baby.
It seems that when the brothers grew up they engaged in mortal combat, and the man was
defeated.
The mere existence of such a legend indicates how deep and time-honoured is the reverence
accorded to the bear.
The Evenki have more than fifty different names for the animal. When one has been killed it
must always be skinned and gutted by a member of another tribe so that its soul will not know
who the real hunter was. Vasilevich records that the eastern Tungus used to preserve the head
and other bones of a slaughtered bear carefully. The head was then hung from a tree and the
bones deposited nearby, either high up on a broad branch or on a wooden platform in the
taiga. lot
P. G. Pallas, who undertook a journey through various Russian provinces between 1768 and
1773, told how the Karagasses used to lay the head and heart of a slaughtered bear on a sheet
of bark, raise it to heaven and pray for a continuance of good hunting. Uno Harva's reference
to the fact that the Karagasses do not eat the brain is extremely interesting. Apparently, they
are reluctant to break the animal's skull. Since, as mentioned before, the brain is considered
the most valuable and tasty part of a bear, we may regard their abstinence as a sacrifice
intended for the high god.
A belief in a single supreme deity and creator prevails among all the ancient peoples whom
we are presumptuous enough to call primitive. Waldemar Jochelson says that he has
established this in the case of the Tungus, Yakuts, Koryaks, Yukaghirs, Kamchadals and
Aleuts.
Even as late as the last century, Western science credited humanity with an upward trend in
religion, an evolutionary chain which began with dark superstition, sorcery and magic and
ended in monotheism. The more man developed, so the theory ran, the more clearly he
recognised the falsity of magic until he eventually reached the highest religious level,
monotheism, or a belief in one god.
Yet magic and monotheism have always existed side by side and still do today. And most
students of ethnology are now convinced that the earliest religious concept was a belief in one
god, and that this 'primitive' monotheism deteriorated as animistic -ideas clouded its purity. It
was only later that magic gained a hold. The weaker the faith in a high god became, the more
magical formulae were called in to supply the deficiency.
Jochelson conducted research into the Yukaghirs in the years 1895 and 1896 and later in 1901
and 1902. And in his writings refers to the high god, known as Pon, to which the Yukaghirs
sacrificed reindeer. In ancient times their offerings used to include dogs and, so tradition has
it, an occasional human being. Human sacrifice was not, however, destined for Pon but for the
spirit of the elk. It was the custom to sacrifice a girl who had set eyes on the head of a
slaughtered elk - an act which signed her death warrant - together with two puppies, a male
and a bitch.
Uno Harva supplies some really startling information. He learned that in the Turuchansk
district the Tungus used to keep not only the skin of bears' heads but also the scalps of
enemies whom they had killed. It is known that the Ostyaks (who are related to the Finns)
and, of course, many American Indian tribes made a habit of scalping their enemies, so that it
is not surprising that the same custom existed in Siberia. When the chieftain of a Yukaghir
tribe died, the flesh was stripped from his corpse with bone knives and dried in the sun. To
avoid physical contact with the dead man, the Yukaghirs wore gloves and masked their faces.
The flesh was put into a sack and hung on stakes or deposited in a tree some feet above the
ground. The Yukaghirs then distributed the dead chief's bones among his relatives, who wore
them as amulets and consulted them whenever an important problem came up for discussion.
The head itself passed into the possession of the tribe's oldest member.
It is evident that the skulls of dead men once played at least as great a role in religion as bears'
skulls. If we go back three or four hundred thousand years in time to the human skulls which
were found at Chou-k'ou-tien near Peking, we must consider whether they fulfilled the same
purpose as the bear skulls of Siberia - whether, in fact, the human skulls of Chou-k'ou-tien
may not have been intended as a form of sacrifice.
In earlier times, the Yukaghirs inhabited a huge area which extended from the Lena to the
Kolyma and the Arctic Ocean to the Verkhoyansk Mountains. They now live eastward of the
lower reaches of the Indagirka and are in grave danger of extinction. Their environment is
ruled by the harshest climate in all Siberia and they are continuously exposed, usually without
shelters adequate to the sharpest of the North winds.
The Cavebear
Wildkirchli, Wildenmannlisloch
and Drachenloch are three Swiss
caves which have yielded the most
interesting discoveries of cave
bears' bones yet made. Traces of
fire were found at all three sites.
According to Heinz Bachler, the
charcoal in the Drachenloch is the
oldest legacy from Stone-Age man
ever to be dated by the radiocarbon
method, and goes back at least fifty
thousand years. The cave bears'
skulls and marrowbone sacrifices in
the Drachenloch indicate that as
early as seventy thousand years ago
man believed in a single god. The
Drachenloch also contained stone
chests or kists which are the earliest
man-made structures yet found.

Magic
Page 183
In the rocky fastnesses of the Alps, we once more pick up the trail of Neanderthal man. High
in the majestic mountainscape of Switzerland, in the cantons of Saint Gallen and Appenzell,
are three caves which have yielded some amazing discoveries: the Wildkirchli. the
Wildenmannlisloch and the Drachenloch.
The approach to the Drachenloch cave
Photo: Christian Mettler http://www.drachenloch.ch/
The Drachenloch cave extends into the rock for 230 feet and
comprises six chambers. Near the entrance the cave walls are
clothed with cave mosses and lichen, a beautiful glowing
green which reaches far into the fading twilight of the
vaulted interior, where the light of day scarcely penetrates.
Fighting a desperate battle for survival, plants suck greedily
at the faint rays of light which help them to manufacture the
chlorophyll that gives them colour.
Photo: Christian Mettler http://www.drachenloch.ch/
Though unknown to the world at large, the Drachenloch has provided the key to innumerable
secrets. Its discoverer, Emil Bachler, spent a lifetime fighting for scientific recognition of his
cave. His realisation that, seventy or eighty thousand years ago, man had been doing sacrifice
there, opened a chink in the thick and all but impenetrable curtain which had hitherto denied
us a glimpse into the spiritual life of Stone-Age man. Also in the Drachenloch were found a
number of stone kists or chests. When the side wall of one large kist was removed, seven well
preserved bear skulls were found in the cavity, carefully piled on top of one another with their
muzzles pointing toward the cave's exit.
(N.B. Some researchers have questioned this interpretation of the stone chests. When slabs of
rock fall from the ceiling of a cave, they very often simulate this sort of structure, with some
coming to rest on their edges after sliding off other debris, and others landing flat, making it
look as though the stone was purposely placed as a lid. There are at least two versions of the
diagram of how the cave bear skulls and the stone chests were arranged, which contradict
each other. Don)
The stone kists found in the Drachenloch are probably the earliest man-made constructions in
the world. All three caves yielded large numbers of bear skulls, some of them scattered about
but others carefully arranged in piles. Portions of cave bears' skeletons were also found neatly
laid out in layers, sometimes side by side and sometimes superimposed. Thirty broken fibulas
were found stored on top of a large slab of rock, their jointed ends all facing one way and
their broken ends the other. In another place, a bear's skull was found ringed by small slabs of
stone, each about the size of a man's hand, which followed the outline of the skull precisely.
In the Drachenloch, small stone walls had been erected about eighteen inches from the wall of
the cave itself. Here, too, fragments of cave bears' skeletons were discovered together with
complete or partial skulls, some of them pierced by holes. Several skulls lay in niche-like
recesses in the rock walls or between fallen boulders.
Apart from this, many extremely diverse types of tool were found, most of them flake tools
like flat shells or broad, roughly fashioned blades. I have examined these tools very closely
for myself. Although they are generally quite small, many of them being only an inch long,
they reveal the formative intervention of the human hand and eye. Many of them, too, are
handsomely coloured. There are flakes Of jasper, brownish red like coagulated blood, other
flakes of green quartzite, chips of green flint, and the cores from which the blades were
originally detached. It is evident that the stone blades were chipped by means of a hard
quartzite hammer. Their cutting edges are crude and irregular, and almost all the blades show
signs of heavy wear. The inhabitants of these caves did not worry about the aesthetic
appearance of their tools, probably because they were birds of passage and only used such
raw material as was available, whatever its inadequacies, in order to manufacture enough
tools for their immediate requirements. Moreover, they apparently only needed simple tools,
probably because they possessed other implements with which they were more familiar and
which seemed more appropriate to their purposes.
These were the bones of the cave bear. Almost all the unbroken cave bear skulls found lacked
a lower jaw, and this lower jaw was used as a percussive implement, one of the canines being
retained for splitting purposes. Hip joint sockets were used for scraping hides, as one can
deduce from the pronounced signs of wear apparent on their edges. It is clear that tanning was
practised here, and we thus know that men were wearing skin garments about eighty thousand
years ago. Weigh one of these hip joint sockets in- your hand, and you will at once realise that
it could have served other purposes. For instance, its concave shape would have made it an
excellent drinking vessel. I cannot personally imagine what other cups Neanderthal man
would have drunk from, if not these natural bone vessels.
The cave bear was Europe's largest Ice Age
predator. It penetrated the Alps and was hunted by
the people of the Mousterian and Aurignacian
periods. Neanderthal man used to sacrifice the skull
and marrowbones of the cave bear to his god. The
reasons for its eventual extinction are unknown.
Photo: Unknown artist, from the site

http://www.drachenloch.ch/
The depths of his cave dwellings were dark, and hip joint sockets may also have solved the
lighting problem. At any rate, they would have made extremely practical bowls for oil lamps.
Every conceivable kind of tool was manufactured out of the bones of the cave bear - possibly
arrowheads, too, though this is very dubious. In general, we can only wonder that men
succeeded in hunting this dangerous creature at all. Perhaps they used only the corpses of
animals which had died from natural causes - though the haut-gout would have deterred the
average modern!
Many bones displayed cutting marks which Emil Bacher, discoverer of the cave, mentioned
but did not illustrate in his published works. Being aware that some authorities have leapt to
the conclusion that no signs of damage were evident on them at all, I consulted Bachler's son.
Heinz Bachler wrote me the following reply: -
I examined a large proportion of the material the year before last and found a number of
cutting marks which are definitely distinguishable from more recent damage, principally on
the articular protuberances of the occipital bone, the first two cervical vertebrae and on the
shoulder and hip joints. By no means all the well preserved bones bore these scratches and
cuts, but, judging from my own practical tests conducted on fresh cow bones with original
stone tools, this is understandable, for considerable pressure must be exerted before one
damages the tough and slippery periosteum, and with a little practice one can sever the
muscles and sinews of a joint without scratching the bone at all.
It may also be conjectured that Neanderthal man purposely avoided damaging skeletons
because he wanted to commit them to eternity intact.
The weapons of the contemporary hunter were very primitive. He may either have driven his
quarry into the interior of a cave, held it at bay there and attempted to kill it with heavy
wooden clubs, or ambushed it on a game path and hurled his spear from a vantage point such
as a rock or tree. Some bears' skulls found in the Drachenloch exhibited half healed fractures
which suggest that man was not always successful in his dangerous pursuit.
The only complete cave bear's skeleton in
existence (Ursus spelaeus Blum) was
unearthed nearly five thousand feet up in the
Wildkirchli cave in Switzerland and now
reposes in the Heimatmuseaum at Saint
Gallen. The cave bear probably carried its
head lower than this reconstruction suggests.
It was the skull and marrowbones of such
mighty creatures (this one is nine feet long)
which men sacrificed to their supreme god
70,000 years ago.
Skeletons of an adult male cave bear and a seven month old cub. The adult skeleton is a
composite of a number of different individuals. The cub was found in an Austrian cave.

The jaw mechanics of the cave
bear may be compared to that of a
spanner, with the pivot of the jaw
joint (cross) raised above the
occlusal plane of the cheek teeth.
In contrast, the pivot of the cat
skull (as exemplified by a lion,
below) is in the same plane as the
teeth and the action resembles that
of a pair of scissors.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The

Cave Bear Story'
The following explanation of the diagram above comes from Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave
Bear Story'
In a meat-eating carnivore like the cat, the cheek teeth of the upper and lowerjaws move past
one another like the blades of a pair of scissors. If you draw a line along the bases of the
cheek teeth, you will find the pivot of the jaw joint in the line's elongation. But if you draw a
similar line for the cave bear, you will find that the jaw joint is raised well above the line, and
this is the condition that induces the strong curvature of the lower border of the jaw
In a scissor motion, the two blades act against each other only at one point at a time, and this
point moves forward as the scissors close. But if a nutcrackerlike action is needed, in which
the whole set of teeth acts at the same time, the pivot must be located well above or below the
level of the teeth. This is the type of action suitable to omnivores and especially to
vegetarians, and it is found not only in the cave bear but also in all the hoofed grazing
animals, horses, antelope, buffalo, etc. Not to mention ourselves!
Lissner continues:
In each of the three caves which have been mentioned, the Wildkirchli, Drachenloch and
Wildenmannlisloch, the skeletal remains of some thousand bears were found. Bachler
assumed that all the bones discovered in the Drachenloch and Wildenmannlisloch had been
brought there by Stone-Age hunters, for bears do not appear to have used them voluntarily as
places of refuge.
On the other hand, Wildkirchli may occasionally have been used for hibernation, but it
certainly was also frequented by human beings from time to time. No animal could have
accumulated these hoards of hunting trophies, nor could they be a freak of nature. Only a
deliberate act on the part of early man can account for them. One of the jawless skulls in the
Drachenloch, for instance, posed an almost insoluble problem. Another bear's femur had been
driven through its tight cheekbone in such a way that it could only be removed by means of a
fairly complicated maneuver. Only a human intelligence could have been responsible for this.
Nature does not build rectangular chests out of flat slabs of stone, nor does she spirit seven
bears' skulls into them.
No one would have guessed that traces of Neanderthal man would be found at such an
altitude. Wildkirchli lies at a height of nearly 5,000 feet, Wildenmannlisloch in the
Churfirsten is more than 5,300 feet up, and Drachenloch above Vattis in the Tamina Valley no
less than 8,000.
How did Neanderthal man reach these altitudes, what induced him to brave the hardships and
dangers involved in such an ascent, and why did he transport such large quantities of bears'
bones into the solitude of the mountains? Why were fragments of cave bears' skulls piled so
neatly on top of one another, and why were the outer edges of the bone cups so highly
polished, as though they had been worn away by generation after generation of human hands?
Were they Neanderthal man's drinking vessels? What was he looking for so far above the tree
line, when he could only have visited these caves in spring or used them as a hunting base in
summer?
In the Drachenloch, beneath the entrance leading from the first chamber into the second,
Bachler came upon a layer of coal black material containing ash and the remains of burnt
wood. In the center of this hearth he found a quantity of small bones and stone fragments,
some charred and others only scorched. The earth beneath the fireplace had been reduced to
red, powdery dust. Examination of the carbonised remains revealed that Neanderthal man had
used pinewood as kindling. Apart from this open hearth, a fire pit was discovered in the
entrance leading from Cave 11 to Cave 111. This was covered by a flat stone slab about
eighteen inches square.
Perhaps seventy thousand years old, the hearthstone's reverse side was stained with smoke,
and the fire pit beneath it contained ash, the remains of charred wood, and burnt bones.
Having explored different possibilities of making fire in the Drachenloch, Bachler established
that smoke was carried away most effectively when fires were kindled beneath the entrances
to the various chambers.
Close by the fire pit was the 'bone altar' on which lay the cave bear's skull with the femur
through the aperture in its cheekbone. Emil Bachler explicitly used the term 'bone altar,' and it
would appear that fire pit and place of sacrifice were in some way connected.
The Drachenloch cave is the most interesting and perhaps the most important cult site in the
entire history of mankind, a place where, more than seventy thousand years ago, thank
offerings were being made to the supreme creative being. They were thank offerings for the
bestowal of game, but they may have had an even more important significance, for the
Drachenloch cave contains the oldest stone structure of religious significance in the world;
indeed, it is the earliest stone monument to the human past and the earliest visible expression
of man's regard for an invisible god.
Some scientists are hard to convince, however. The Swiss palaeontologist F. E. Koby, for
instance, has questioned whether the bears' bones display any signs of human workmanship at
all and disputes that the caves reveal any traces of Palaeolithic man. He suggests that bears
were considered too dangerous to hunt at the time and describes the dry stone wall, upright
stone slabs, bears' skulls and marrowbones in the Drachenloch as 'fortuitous,' attributing the
signs of wear on the tools found there to the trampling of bears' feet.
Most of the objects found in the Drachenloch, Wildkirchli and Wildenmannlisloch caves are
now in Saint Gallen's regional museum. I have devoted a great deal of time to these finds,
have examined them closely, and cannot agree that Koby is correct. No one has yet disproved
Bachler's dating of his finds, and it seems that the Drachenloch must have been inhabited by
Neanderthal man during the last interglacial, that is to say, in the warm period which preceded
the last Ice Age when temperatures may have approximated those of our own day.
Certainly neither beast nor man could have existed at or even reached such an altitude during
the height of the Ice Age. The primitive stone and bone tools found in the Drachenloch best
lend themselves to classification in the Mousterian, i.e. in the Neanderthalian culture. The
primitive substage of the Mousterian, the preMousterian, represented by the Drachenloch
finds discloses every aspect of Neanderthal man's tenacious struggle for self-preservation, yet
it must have had its lighter moments, for the Wildenmannlisloch yielded thirty small, white,
almost circular quartzite pebbles which were geologically alien to the cave and must have
been brought there by Palaeolithic man. We do not know what they were meant to be or what
purpose they fulfilled, but it is probable that they were accumulated simply because of their
aesthetically pleasing shape, possibly even as pieces for some form of game.
No human bones were found, although human fossils would have have survived quite as well
as animals'. One explanation of this may be that man disliked living so close to his dead and
was afraid of them. Fear of the dead was not uncommon at this period, as the bound corpses
found in other parts of the world prove. Again, burial places have been identified in caves
situated at lower altitudes. Perhaps this is an individual case in which the absence of human
fossils can be attributed to man's unwillingness to turn his living quarters into a burial place,
or to the fact that he never remained here for long and the probability of death during
residence was thus correspondingly less.
All in all, the caves remain an unsolved mystery, as Bachler himself admitted. How, for
instance, can we explain the discovery, in a carefully protected niche in one of the chambers
of the Wildenmannlisloch, of a small figure resembling a female sculpture? Made out of the
lower jaw of a cave bear, it may be either an artefact or a freak of nature. One thing is certain:
the flattened planes of its 'head' were rubbed smooth by some human agency; perhaps, as Emil
Bachler suggests, because the bone was originally used as an instrument for smoothing animal
skins. This may also be the reason why certain portions of the so-called 'pseudo Venus' appear
to have been polished.
Wildkirchli, Wildenmannlisloch and Drachenloch are three Swiss caves which have yielded
the most interesting discoveries of cave bears' bones yet made. Traces of fire were found at all
three sites. According to Heinz Bachler, the charcoal in the Drachenloch is the oldest legacy
from Stone-Age man ever to be dated by the radiocarbon method, and goes back at least fifty
thousand years. The cave bears' skulls and Marrowbone sacrifices in the Drachenloch indicate
that as early as seventy thousand years ago man believed in a single god. The Drachenloch
also contained stone chests or kists which are the earliest man-Made structures yet found.
Bachler is of the opinion that the figure came into being accidentally, as a result of continual
friction due to use, not as a deliberate attempt to reproduce the shape of a human head. I have
examined the figure closely. The closed eyes, delicate mouth, small forehead, slim,neck and
back all convey an impression of careful workmanship. A second 'Venus' discovered in the
same hiding place has smooth patches but no recognisable head.
Even if the pseudo Venus was not actually made by Stone-Age man, the cave dweller must
have noticed its resemblance to the first of a girl. Why else would he have put it to one side
and preserved it so carefully? The prehistorian Friedrich Behn, in his book Vorgeschichte
Europas, asserts that the people of the Neanderthalian race were lacking in any form of artistic
impulse. The celebrated Venus statuettes of the Stone Age belong to the Aurignacian, a far
later period. The pseudo Venus may, therefore, be unique in its period, the earliest portrayal
of the human figure known to have been made, or at least recognised as such, by man. It is
probably the most remarkable evidence of prehistoric activity or comprehension in the world.
Between four and five inches tall, the Venus was found on October 21, 1926, and reposes
today in the Heimatmuseum at Saint Gallen, a Palaeolithic Sleeping Beauty waiting to rejoice
the eye of the occasional visitor.
Evidences of Palaeolithic bear sacrifices have also been found outside Switzerland - so far
afield, in fact, that the idea of sacrifice appears to have been common to numerous Middle
Palaeolithic people and not merely the prerogative of a few individual magicians or priests.
Traces of ritual burial or sacrifice were discovered in the Petershohle near Velden (Central
Franconia in Germany), in the Teufelshohle near Pottenstein (French Switzerland), in the
Kitzelberghohle in the Bober-Katzbach Mountains, in Cabrerets; (in the Department of Lot in
France), in the Caverne des Furtins (Saone-et-Loire, France), and in alpine and subalpine cave
sites in Yugoslavia. Cave bear skulls, other bones and Mousterian tools were 'found in such a
peculiar position that they are quite irreconcilable with natural precedents.' In the
Salzofenhohle, more than six thousand feet up in the Totes Gebirge not far from Aussee in
Austria, the palaeontologist and palaeobiologist Kurt Ehrenberg found three cave bears' skulls
which had been accurately ringed with stones. In all three cases, charcoal remains were
discovered beside or beneath the skulls. In the Petershohle, bears' skulls had been carefully
deposited in small holes and niches. In a cupboard - like recess in the rock wall, four feet
above the floor of the cave, five skulls, two femurs and a humerus were found, all belonging
to cave bears. The skulls fell to pieces in the diggers' hands/ during removal. The man
responsible for exploring the Petershohle, K. Hormann, declared: 'These skeletal remains
could not have got up there or in there by any natural means.' It seems probable therefore that
they were a conscious committal to eternity and a deliberate sacrifice, not a fortuitous act but
a calculated gesture, toward an exalted and timeless power.
A large quantity of bear fossils were found near Mixnitz in Styria, Austria, in a cave known as
the Drachenhohle. Man had taken refuge there from time to time and cave bears had also lived
deep in the interior, though it is improbable that man and bear occupied the cave
simultaneously.
Near a spring two hundred yards or so from the entrance to the cave, living quarters and a
fireplace were identified, together with artificially arranged stones, bones displaying traces of
fire and large numbers of utensils. The large eye-teeth of cave bears had been fashioned into
tools, weapons and scrapers, the latter having been used principally to remove sinews from
fat.
The discoveries made in this cave surpass one's wildest imaginings. The remains of no less
than fifty thousand bears have been counted there, although the place was frequented by these
animals for such an immense span of time that this works out at only a few bears per annum!
Far in the depths of the cave are a number of very narrow passages formed by huge blocks of
stone which had fallen from the walls and roof, and on the sides of these passages can be seen
the marks of bears' paws, so distinct in places that the five furrows made by one set of claws
can easily be counted. It is immediately apparent that the animals were in dire straits,
probably because they had been trapped and were exerting every ounce of energy in a
desperate attempt to escape.
Scratch marks of this type were identified at several

points in the cave's interior, but always where the
walls narrowed. Sometimes vertical and sometimes
horizontal, they are visible evidence of a dramatic
fight for freedom, escape and survival. Adolf
Bachofen von Echt, Austrian palaeontologist,
surmised that snares had been laid in these defiles, a
laborious task, considering that the everlasting gloom
of the cave's interior could have been only sparingly
illumined by oil lamps. When a bear was trapped,
man would creep up and try to kill it with his
primitive stone weapons. The snares were probably
made out of bear's sinew, which meant that the
animals fell prey to the unyielding strength of their
own tough fibres.
Man must have laid his traps before a bear entered the cave to hibernate. Then, perhaps
carrying a flaring pine torch in one hand, he slipped into the cave in the animal's wake. It must
have been an exhausting and dangerous business, following the great beast as it retreated ever
farther into the depths, clambering up steep walls of shelving rock until it reached the defile
and was caught. Then came the animal's struggle to break loose, the hunter's wary approach,
his darting attacks and withdrawals as he tried to deliver the coup de grace. The only way to
club a bear to death was to aim for the base of its snout, no easy matter with an animal of the
cave bear's elemental strength. Healed fractures in some of the skulls found testify that the
hunter occasionally missed his mark during these life-and-death encounters, allowing the bear
to break away. One skull, dug up at Brno in Czechoslovakia, had a complete flint embedded
in it, which indicates that man used his primitive weapons on the awesome predator at quite
close quarters.
Many types of bear were found in the various layers in the Mixnitz cave, among them truly
gigantic beasts with skulls two feet long. Skulls of other specimens varied in width from very
broad to very narrow. The cave was occupied for a remarkable length of time, perhaps a
hundred thousand years, which would explain the enormous quantities and wide variety of
remains discovered there.
And in one fairly secluded side passage were found seventeen bears' skulls, all placed
carefully in an upright position. We are again reminded of the Swiss and Franconian cave
sacrifices.
All sacrifice presupposes a deity. If I had not been told repeatedly by the Tungus of the North
Manchurian taiga that the time-honoured practice of offering the skull and marrowbones of
their quarry was a sacrifice to the supreme god, I should be doubtful about this, but the
sacrifices of the Siberian peoples in the Arctic cultural zone are definitely directed toward an
invisible being who is the sky and light and universe - in a word, God.
Cave Bears may have been Carnivorous
Adapted from:
http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2008/01/07/cave_bears_from_the_carpathians_as_omni
vorous_as_modern_bears.html
Rather than being gentle giants, new research reveals that Pleistocene cave bears ate both
plants and animals and competed for food with the other contemporary large carnivores of the
time: hyaenas, lions, wolves, and our own human ancestors.
The study, conducted by an international group of researchers, including Erik Trinkaus,

Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, will appear the week
of Jan. 7 in the online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) have long fascinated paleontologists and anthropologists, given
the abundance of their large skeletal remains in Pleistocene hibernation caves across western
Eurasia. For the past 30 years, studies of their bones and teeth, and especially the nitrogen
isotopes in their bone protein, have concluded that they were largely vegetarian.
The interpretation of them as vegetarian has evoked an image of gentle giants, feeding on
berries and roots. However, new nitrogen isotope data from the Peştera cu Oase in
southwestern Romania shows otherwise. Although many of these cave bears appear to have
been largely vegetarian, the Oase bears and scattered individuals from other cave sites show
that they were sometimes as omnivorous as modern brown bears, including North American
Kodiak and grizzly bears.
Nitrogen 15 has one more neutron than the more common nitrogen 14. Animals accumulate
Nitrogen 15 in their bodies, and carnivores accumulate more of it than vegetarians do. The
cave bears in Pestera cu Oase have high Nitrogen 15 levels, suggesting that they were
carnivorous, or possibly cannibalistic. It may be that they got the extra Nitrogen 15 from fish,
also.
Source : Washington University in St. Louis
The Bear Festival

The peop
since the
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believed
supreme
and
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and skulls
the arctic
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Pole. Bea
however,
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Photo: Li
Man, Go
Magic
The Ainus consider that there is One God towering above all, who is the Maker of all others,
and to whom all are responsible, for they are His servants and deputies.
J. Batchelor, The Ainu of Japan, London, 1892, P 248
The Orochi on killing the bear say: 'Go fast; go to your master; put a new fur on, and come
again next year that I may look at you.'
Sternberg, Gilyaks, P. 439
Map of the distribution of bear cults and the

text which immediately follows from:
Campbell, Joseph: The way of the Animal Powers (Historical Atlas of World Mythology vol 1)
Alfred van der Marck editions, Dist by Harper and Row, SF CA 1983
The earliest evidence anywhere on earth of the veneration of a divine being is in the Alpine
bear-skull sanctuaries of Neanderthal Man. A second period and stage is represented in the
figures of bears deliberately stabbed in the Magdalenian temple caves of Montespan and Les
Trois Frères, and a third in the Epipaleolithic finds of Norway and Denmark.
Across the Eurasian North, the period from 6000 to 2500 BC was an era of climatic optimum,
warmer than today, with vegetation zones extending north of their present limits. The bear
cult spread northeastward with the advancing populations and is represented in myths and
customs from Finland to Labrador.
My thanks to John Saul for leading me to this source.
Page 232
Science has not yet explained the hominid's transition from concrete to abstract thought. If
man did not, in Albright's phrase, 'raise himself by his own bootstraps,' some other force must
have been instrumental.
I am convinced that the oldest races in the world, food gatherers and hunters, originally
believed in a supreme being. This is a fact which many leading modern students of ethnology
no longer dispute, and one which brings us very close to the oldest races' traditional belief that
man's knowledge of God stems from the Creation itself.
If Western culture has not yet fully accepted the modern scientific realisation that monotheism
came at the beginning of human existence, this is due to the general confusion which prevails
in humanity's third religious era, the era of idolatry. We are living in the very middle of that
era, at the height of an age that corresponds to,the lekan-chaitan ideas of the primitive
Siberian peoples. This is not to say that the quest for God has been abandoned. On the
contrary, it is very much alive, mainly because faith in God has so largely been destroyed by
the onset of all conquering science.
As the knowledge or conviction of a single supreme god gradually waned, so the notion of a
lord of the mountains, forests and seas came into being. And the further the supreme god
retreated from man's world of ideas and beliefs the nearer to him man wanted to be, in
accordance with the age-old belief which has it that absence makes the heart grow fonder.
In consequence, he either summoned the effigy of the primordial god of his recollection down
from the skies to the mountaintops or attempted to approach the supreme being via a lord of
the mountains. But even this was not enough. Man sought a direct relationship with his lost
god, a relationship which no abstract lord of the mountains, forests and seas could supply. In
search of a mediator, some of the oldest circumpolar races selected a being who could form
the desired link, and this being was the bear. The bear has fulfilled this intermediary function
for twenty or even thirty thousand years, and still does among certain circumpolar tribes
today.
I was able to explore the vestiges of the bear cult at a time when those who believed in the
bear's intermediary function were at the point of extinction. Like all facts that are obliterated
by the passage of time, customs, cults and ideas are here today, hearsay tomorrow and lost in
the limbo of legend and tradition the day after tomorrow. That is how man's knowledge of
God became transformed into faith, and why man's faith has declined with each step he has
taken down the ladder of religious development. A little while longer, and the bear cult, too,
will be legend, but when I knew them the peoples of the North still had a mediator whom they
entrusted with a task in the belief that he would fulfil it.
How to build a bridge between the earth and the lord of the mountains? A live bear cannot be
sent to the sacred heights, but a dead bear's soul can wing its way to the place where the fate
of the Gilyaks is decided. The bear is not, therefore, sacrificed - as he was in the days of
Neanderthal man - but dispatched on a mission. He is only the conveyor of sacrifice, not its
victim.
This may explain why the bear is so important in the life of the Gilyaks, and why the
prehistoric relationship between man and bear played a role whose significance can scarcely
be assessed today and is unknown to the majority of our contemporaries.
Capturing a young bear, the Gilyaks take him back to their settlement and keep him in a cage
for two or three years. All the members of the clan know that the little bear is destined for the
bear festival, so they treat him as an honoured guest, feed him with all manner of titbits, take
him for walks on his chain, bathe him, and generally take an interest in his welfare.
When the day of the bear festival draws near, large quantities of food and drink are prepared
for the clansmen and their guests. Every family in the clan shares in the preparations,
arranging the place of execution and making the inao or symbolic effigies of mediators
between the Gilyaks and the lord of the mountains which are hung on the end of poles in
pairs, each pair representing man and wife.
Then comes the festival itself. The bear is taken out of his cage and led from yurt to yurt,
being greeted by universal laughter and rejoicing as each family tries to demonstrate the
measure of its respect for the animal. However, it is the custom for individuals to tease the
growling creature and arouse its fury. A favourite piece of bravado is to grasp the animal's
head, kiss it and jump back out of range. If the bear lashes out and scores a Gilyak's shoulder,
the wound is regarded as a mark of honour. Finally, the bear is led out onto the frozen surface
of the sea or local river to visit the holes where the Gilyaks fish in winter. This guarantees
good fishing for the rest of the year.
The bear is led three times around the house of the family which has reared it, after which the
master of the house leads it inside, alternately tormenting it with a long stick and addressing it
in the friendliest terms.
I assume that this mixture of cruelty and respect is based on the belief that while the animal's
flesh has to be tortured and killed its spirit should be treated in a kind and friendly fashion
before it sets off on its long journey, because a soul is more easily liberated by torment and
agony.
The unfortunate bear is then tied to two posts adorned with inao and left on his own while the
Gilyaks go to their yurts to celebrate and the narch-en prepare the bows and arrows which are
shortly to send the animal on his way.
Who are these narch-en? The bear festival is known by the Gilyaks as 'bear play.' Alexander
Slawik, Austrian ethnologist, records that the participants in a bear festival consist of three
clans, each related to the other by a prescribed form of intermarriage.
Clan A draws its wives principally from Clan B and gives its marriageable girls exclusively to
Clan C. In this instance, the men of Clan C supply the narch-en. Assuming that Clan A has
reared the bear, the festival will be given by Clan A, and Clan C will be the guests of honour.
Among the Gilyaks, the bear is always killed by the guests, never by the animal's guardians.
Similarly, it is the guests who actually eat the bear and take the greater part of its meat home
with them.
Clans A and B represent the bear clans in the ceremony, play or drama, while Clan C
represents the human clan. The A and B groups play the part of bears and the C group the
hunters. Leo Sternberg also confirms that the actual killing is left to the guests, while the hosts
deliberately aim wide of the mark. Alexander Slawik concludes that the ceremonial killing is
a dramatisation of the bear hunt in which the hosts represent the bear clans and the guests
personify the hunters. This seems highly plausible, but why the sharp division of roles? I
believe that it springs from the fear which all northern tribes have of the soul of a slaughtered
bear. The division of roles is thus a diversionary maneuver in which the hosts are Gilyaks
who, having reared a bear, would never do it any harm, and the guests play the part of
strangers. Thus, a bear is sent on its way still well disposed toward its hosts and gives the
spirit of the mountain and forest a good report of the Gilyaks, believing itself to have been
killed by quite another tribe. The Gilyaks feed a bear extremely well before killing it and
entreat it to take the coup de grace in good part. They also wish it a good journey to its master
and express the hope that it will gain the mountain heights for the Gilyak clan.
Only then is the animal led to the appointed place, attended by all the male members of the
various clans but none of the womenfolk. The best marksmen fire a few preliminary shots at a
chosen target while small boys pelt the bear with stones. Suddenly, silence falls. The oldest
narch-en, who must also be the best shot, bends his bow, waits until the beast presents its
heart to him, and then lets fly. Immediately, several men step forward and shake the bear
roughly. Hallowell suggests that this is to accelerate death, but the Gilyaks told me that this
shaking is supposed to free the soul from the body.
In exactly the same way,
the Gilyaks and Ainus tie
a bear to a stake and then
shoot it with blunt arrows
until, finally, the best
marksman among them
dispatches the beast with
a spear thrust or arrow
shot in the breast. This
image depicts the Gilyak
bear ceremony.
Photo: Lissner - Man,

God and Magic
The dead bear is then laid in the snow with its head pointing westward, so that it will not be
awakened by the rising sun before it sees the lord of the mountains. The Gilyaks proceed to
eat small pouches of food which have previously been hung around the bear's body. There
ensues the skinning and dismemberment of the carcass according to a strictly prescribed
ritual.
In the course of the bear
festival, the bear is killed and
its soul soars to the lord of the
forests and mountains.
Although the Gilyaks never
portray the supreme god in
whom they believe, they do
make effigies of Pal Nibach,
the lord of forest and mountain,
and even wear them as a form
of amulet.

Magic
After the bear

ceremony, the Gilyaks
put the animal's skull
on the end of a pole and
display it at the
ceremonial site,
preserving it to ensure
the bear's reincarnation.
The two hooks on the
left are used for
hoisting the bear's
carcass. In the
foreground, a Gilyak
bear-spear blade,
which, like the
Orochon's palma, was
fastened to a wooden
shaft.
Photo: Lissner - Man,
God and Magic
The whole skin complete with head is hung up on a wooden framework and food is laid out in
front of it in numerous bowls. Meanwhile, the meat is boiled and the entertainment of the
narch-en commences. Although the hosts are permitted to eat only the soup from the bear
mixed with rice, the guests are forced to eat and drink on a Gargantuan scale, and the feasting
lasts for some days. When the narch-en do finally depart, their hosts load their sledges with
food and the remains of the bear meat. In return, the guests leave behind gifts for the bear and
present their hosts with dogs which are slaughtered and sacrificed in the bear's honour.
Carved ladle used for

serving meat at the bear
festival.
Photo: Lissner - Man, God

and Magic
Fragment of root, ending in three bear's heads,

used for dividing bear's meat. The Gilyaks call
this implement a takhai.

The skin taken from the head of a
bear killed during a bear
ceremony is used as a dancing
mask at the next festival

Magic
The Ainu Bear Ceremony
Since I met only relatively few Gilyak men who could give me detailed information about the
bear cult, I also visited the Ainus. Torii, the famous Japanese expert on the Tungus, believes
that the Ainus of prehistoric times were unfamiliar with the bear cult and only adopted it later
from the Gilyaks.
The Ainus live in the north of Japan on the island of Hokkaido, but they used also to live on
the now Russian island of Sakhalin and in the Kuriles. Their origins are still unidentified, but
they are probably an isolated racial group of Caucasian stock, a very ancient human type
related to the present inhabitants of western Europe in build, shape of skull and pigmentation.
I have talked with the Ainus on the island of Hokkaido and visited them in their bleak clusters
of squat, thatched and wooden huts, villages and townships with names like Horobetsu,
Piratori, Nieptani, Chitose, Yurappo, Oshamamu, Shiraoi and Shadai. Looking into their eyes,
which are straight and lack the slanting lids of the Mongol, one might almost take them for
Europeans, yet there is something Asiatic or even Polynesian about them, particularly the
women.
When I say Polynesian I am not referring to the tattooing which Ainu girls have to undergo at
a very tender age. This takes the form of a broad stripe above the upper lip which tapers to a
point on either side like a moustache. It is not, however, intended to simulate a strong growth
of hair on the upper lip, but is merely a form of personal adornment.
Leo Sternberg espoused the view that the Ainus migrated to Japan from the South Seas,
basing his theory on various features of their material culture which are common to the
Micronesians and other Pacific races as well. The weaver's loom, the outrigger, the bow
formerly used by the Ainu, an ancient type of wooden club, the cradle and various forms of
ornamentation - all these are enlisted as evidence of the Ainus' Oceanic origins. However, the
Ainu race has lived on the Japanese islands for a very long time and seems to have been
installed long before any Polynesians or Mongols ever landed there. Indeed, since it once
dominated the whole of the Japanese area, cultural elements such as bow and outrigger may
well have been adopted, not transmitted, by the peoples of the Pacific. The Japanese scholar
K. Koya assumes, probably with justification, that the Ainus were the exiled offshoot of some
main European stock. Attention may be drawn in this connection to strange wooden batons
which are peculiar to the Ainus and probably hail from the Palaeolithic period of the Eurasian
mainland. These small sticks are about a foot long and are engraved with double circles
(perhaps eyes), wavy lines, stylised symbols reminiscent of animals' heads and intricate
patterns. The only things of comparable appearance are the horn batons of the Aurignacian
and Mousterian. The Ainus' small pointed sticks, which are objects of great reverence, have
been called 'beard raisers,' but this description is misleading. The Ainus dip one into a
drinking bowl when sacrificing and allow a few drops to fall from it as a libation to the deity.
Later, when raising the bowl to their lips, they sometimes use the same small stick to hold
their beards away from the rim. Georges Montadon has aptly christened the sticks baguettes
de libation or 'libation wands.'
In the seventh century, the Ainus' domain extended as far south as Tokyo, but today they
number barely fifteen thousand, all on Hokkaido and most of them intermarried with
Japanese. They were still waging a desperate struggle against the Japanese invaders as
recently as A.D 720, but were eventually compelled to withdraw into the colder northern
regions of Hokkaido, Sakhalin and the Kuriles.
The former masters of all Japan now spend their time carving small wooden bears, stitching
the atush, a garment made of elm bark, for foreign tourists, and awaiting their final extinction
in wretched huts which have been turned into museums for the benefit of ethnologists. The
Ainu language is a rich one, and many Japanese words are derived from it, not least the name
of their most sacred mountain, the extinct volcano Fuji-no-yama. A large world of ideas,
recollections and ancient rites link the Ainus with the bear, to which they attribute their whole
existence, their creation and origin. Their name for the bear is kimum-kamui the word kamui
being almost certainly an ancient form of kami, the Japanese expression for divinity. A bear is
therefore the 'superior being that dwells amid the mountains,' and he represents the mediator
between this world and the next. No animal could fulfil this function better, for none, in the
Ainus' opinion, looks more like man or has a more 'human' soul. Consequently,, the Ainus'
most important festival is the iomante or 'sending home of the soul.'
Like the Gilyaks, the Ainus capture and rear a bear cub carefully. John Batchelor, the greatest
authority on the Ainus, said that he at first refused to believe the story that Ainu women
suckled young bears but was later forced to reverse his opinion. Writing at the turn of the
century, he declared that he had often seen women giving cubs their breasts. On one occasion,
he found himself preaching at one end of a hut while five women sat in a circle at the other,
passing a bear cub from lap to lap and each giving it a little milk.
At first, the little bear is kept indoors and taken into bed when it cries at night. When it gets
bigger, the Ainus put it in a cage until the day comes for its soul to be 'sent home.' All the
inhabitants of the Ainu village and guests from neighbouring settlements assemble for the
occasion in ceremonial dress. The invitation runs as follows 'I intend to sacrifice the dear little
divine animal that dwells in the mountains. Honoured friends, come to the feast. Let us unite
in the great joy of sending home its soul.'
The guests assemble around the fire, drinking in moderation, laughing, dancing and clapping
their hands. One of the Ainus then informs the bear that its soul is to be sent to its ancestors.
He begs the bear's pardon and utters the hope that, far from being annoyed, it will ensure that
a good bear comes back to be dispatched once more.
'Thou wast brought into the world for us to hunt. We have reared thee with great love. Now
that thou are grown, we send thee to thy father and mother. When thou reachest them, tell
them how good we were to thee. And come again, we pray thee, that we may sacrifice thee
once more.'
After this prayer, the bear is pinioned with ropes and led into the midst of the guests, who sit
around in a circle. It is then tied to a stake and shot with blunt arrows or thrashed with a rod
called the takusa so that it becomes thoroughly enraged. This torment at the stake continues
until the animal's strength begins to wane.
This is the signal for the best marksman present to dispatch the bear with an arrow in the
breast, making sure that no drop of blood touches the earth. It is then laid on the ground with
its neck between two beams and throttled for good measure. The dead beast is skinned and its
meat boiled and ceremonially eaten amid prayers. The head is severed from the skin and
impaled on a stake known as the keomandemi or 'stake of dispatch.' Meanwhile, its blood is
drunk by the men, who thereby assimilate the animal's strength and virtues and participate in
its dispatch.
The Ainu were still celebrating

bear ceremony in the 20th Cen
This picture shows a roped bear b
shot with arrows.
Photo: Lissner - Man, God and Ma
The Udehe celebrate the bear festival exactly like the Gilyaks and very like the Ainus. I was
told that only two or three hundred Udehe were still alive. These last survivors of a Tungusic-
Manchurian tribe live between the Ussuri and the Sea of Japan around the tributaries of the
Khor, Bikin and Iman.
When, in December, January or February, the bear's soul set off on its journey to the lord of
the mountains and forests and the greatest festival in the year had been duly celebrated, the
Udehe could look up at the clear image of Pole Star and hope that they had a good advocate in
heaven who would guarantee their hunting and their existence in general. Alas, the bear must
have failed in his mission, for the Udehe are dying out.
Harva reports that among the Ostyaks and Voguls the bear festival is followed by dancing and
dramatic performances in which the Ostyak women run about making fluttering motions with
their arms and the Voguls dress up as birds of prey. As Harva says, 'This symptom of
primitive hunter's culture, which undoubtedly goes back to the far-off Stone Age, casts light
on the prehistory of human histrionics.' We are here confronted by what are probably relics of
the earliest form of dramatic art in the world. After feasting off a bear, the hunters place the
animal's bones on a raised platform and fire a last shot at the resting place before returning
home.
Only about a hundred members of the Olcha, a small tribe which fished and hunted the lower
reaches of the Amur between Aofiysk and Bogorodsk, still survive. Both the Olcha and Golds
believe that the taiga is inhabited by forest men whom they call duanteni. These forest men
are lords of the taiga and of animals. The Russian scholar A. M. Zolotarev surmises that the
Gilyaks, Ainus, Orochi, Negidals and Olcha all connect the bear festival with commemoration
of their dead kinsmen. The Olcha consider the killing of the bear an act of reincarnation, an
act which causes the bear, killed in the festival, to go to his parents, the forest men, and bring
them the sacrifices of common men.
The ancient Finns used to bid the slaughtered bear: 'Tell them, when thou comest to thy forest
home, that thou hast not been ill treated here but fed on honey and plied with mead.' This and
many other passages reminiscent of an erstwhile bear cult are to be found in the ancient
Finnish bear songs compiled by Kaarle Krohn.
North American tribes such as the Tlingits, the Kwakiutl, and, above all, the Algonkin
celebrate bear festivals much like those of North Asian tribes and are equally careful to adhere
to prescribed rituals. This is one of the surest indications that the Tungusic peoples were once
linked with the Indian tribes of North America, for the primeval home of all bear cults must
undoubtedly have been not North America but Eurasia. There is abundant evidence to suggest
that the Algonkin's ancestors were of Siberian origin, and no serious scholar now disputes that
the various pre-Columbian migrations to America had their point of departure in Asia. The
Wenner-Gren Institute of Anthropological Research in New York has already brought to light
interesting information about the transpacific cultural relationships between Asia, Oceania
and America, and the Austrian ethnologist Robert Heine-Geldern has demonstrated that the
problem of these relationships cannot be solved by rough-and-ready methods like those
employed by Thor Heyerdahl of Kon Tiki fame. One cannot talk of America and Polynesia in
vacuo and leave the fact of Asia entirely out of the picture.
As we have seen, the same bear cult can be identified at many points around the Pole, though
somewhat inland. Some remarkably interesting comparisons can be drawn between various
different peoples. For instance, the inland races of Siberia send a mediator to the exalted being
who, as lord of the mountains, stands immediately below God. Not only do we find the same
bear cult among the ancient tribes of North America, but we catch echoes of it in the Stone
Age.
The Ainus and Gilyaks kill a bear by shooting it through the heart or lungs with an arrow. The
wounded bear depicted in the cave of Trois-Freres is spewing blood from its snout and
muzzle. The Gilyaks stone a bear before killing it. Small ovals on the bear picture in the
Trois-Freres cave show where stones are striking its body.
The Ainus shoots a bear with blunt arrows before putting it out of its misery. The bear
sculpture of Montespan exhibits indentations made by arrows of this type or other weapons.
The Gilyaks hang the skin of a dead bear on a framework. The same applies to the bear
sculpture of Montespan.
It must be regarded as one of the greatest marvels elicited by the modern study of prehistory
that both customs - the sacrificing of bears' skulls seventy thousand years ago and the bear
cult of about thirty thousand years ago have been rediscovered in the Stone Age. We have
proved that the skull and marrowbones of the bear were sacrificed during the Mousterian. At
that time, some seventy thousand years ago, man - probably Neanderthal man - was
apparently sacrificing to a supreme god, and sacrificing just as the people of the Arctic coastal
cultures still do today, so long afterward.
And in the Aurignacian and Magdalenian, thirty or twenty thousand years ago, bear cult rites
were being performed much like those which I have seen at the great bear festivals of the
Gilyaks, Ainus and other representatives of the so-called inland cultures. It cannot be mere
chance that the bear cult of our own day and that which we have identified in French caves
bear so striking a resemblance to one another. Three hundred thousand years ago in Peking,
seventy thousand years ago in the Alps and thirty thousand years ago in southern France (and
probably eastern Asia) man believed in a supreme god. There may still be room for doubt
where Peking man is concerned, but in the case of Neanderthal man and Cro-Magnon man
this faith stands proved, even if the god of twenty or thirty thousand years ago was looked
upon only as a lord of the mountains, beasts and water.
Thus, animals were not painted solely in order to encompass their destruction. At least, not all
of them were portrayed for the purpose of gaining power over them, for they were proteges of
a father of animals and hunting, of a universal father of nature behind whom, invisible to us
and unportrayable by the men of the Stone Age, stood God. This was the idea upon which the
cave painter drew for inspiration. Man did not raise art to the remarkable heights represented
by Altamira and Lascaux out of selfish and petty motives alone.
If we find it hard to grasp that the hunters of so long ago had more in mind than edible game,
we must remember that mankind's spiritual striving has waned as his acquisitiveness has
grown. We are far away from Creation, but the men of five hundred thousand years ago were
near it. Believing in a single god, they were impelled to build an artistic bridge to him twenty
thousand years ago. Today, we are so far from our erstwhile link with the creative force that
no bridge can span the gulf.
That the caves were sites not of magical activity but of religious or cult observance is
demonstrated by two amazing works ascribed to Magdalenian man. The Montespan cave in
Haute-Garonne contains the clay figure of a bear. It is not a particularly beautiful piece of
sculpture. The discoverer of the Trois-Freres cave, Count Begouen, famous French
prehistorian, compared it with the sort of shapes children make in the snow. The Magdalenian
artist had not displayed any great virtuosity, nor had he produced anything as realistic as the
splendid pair of bison at Tuc d'Audoubert. Nevertheless, 170 yards from the mouth of the
Montespan cave in the small low-roofed chamber at its far end, Stone-Age man must have
had something special in mind. His bear had no head, yet there is absolutely no doubt that
figure was planned and executed as such from the beginning. There it lay on the floor of the
cave like an unwieldy sphinx with its thick forepaws stretched out in front of it - and between
them Count Begouen found the skull of a real bear.
An amazing similarity exists

between bear ceremonies
performed some 20,000 years ago
during the Madelanian, and the
Gilyak festivals from our own era.
Deep in the interior of the
Montespan cave (Houte-Garronne)
Count Begouen discovered the
headless clay figure of a bear.
Between its forepaws lay the fallen
skull of a real bear which had once
been attached to the figure itself.
Thirty or so deep circular holes
visible on the sculpture are
assumed to be traces of spears or
arrows used in the bear ceremony
of 20,000 years ago.

Magic
What was the significance of this? The only possible conclusion was that a real bear's skull
was attached to the figure's neck on certain occasions or that it was sometimes draped with a
complete bearskin, head included. Count Begouin established that the convex surface of the
sculpture had been worn away as though by friction, which may mean that the process of
draping and undraping continued at intervals over a very long period of time. Yet another fact
was adduced to prove that the skull lying between the forepaws had really fallen off the
sculpture itself. In the centre of the abbreviated neck was a triangular depression which may
once have held the bone or wooden peg that supported the skull. The hole is so small that
some authorities have doubted whether it could have been used for such a purpose, but if the
statue was draped with a whole bearskin still attached to the head very little support would
have been needed and the small triangular hole would have been entirely adequate.
Describing his discovery. Count Begouin made the following, extremely interesting remark:
'We may assume that we found the skull at the spot where it had lain ever since the last
ceremony.'
But this is not all. The sculpture was pockmarked all over with round, deep holes which
looked as though they had been made by fingers or sticks. These thirty indentations suggest
that the figure had been ritually speared or shot with arrows.
The Trois-Freres cave (Montesquicu-Avantes, Ariege) was discovered in 1914 by Count

Begouin and his three sons, after whom it was named. This cave contains a great wealth of
rock paintings situated more than five hundred yards from its mouth. Among them is one of a
bear with a thick stream of blood flowing from its muzzle. The animal is obviously in
extremis. Its body is dotted with small circles and ovals to represent the stones which have
struck it, and it has also been wounded by arrows. One of these must have penetrated a lung,
for only this would explain the stream of blood gushing from its snout and muzzle.
The Austrian palaeontologist Othenio Abel includes two further portrayals of mortally
wounded bears in a group which he ascribes to a single cult, and it is interesting to note that
only bears and no other animals figure in this sanguinary type of picture.
From:
http://www.archive.org/stream/worldofcaves027512mbp/worldofcaves027512mbp_djvu.txt
Pages 118 - 125 from the book "The World of Caves" by Anton Liibke, translated from the
German by Michael Rullock COWARD-McCANN, INC. NEW YORK.
First American Edition 1958, first published in Germany under the title GEHEIMNISSE DBS
UNTERIRDISCHEN by Kurt Schroeder Verlag, Bonn
English translation 1958 by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd, Library of Congress
Catalog Card Number 58-10,074
The Home of the Cave Bear
Skeletons of the prehistoric great cave bear are almost never missing from amongst the faunal
remains in European caves. The cave bear seems to have been distributed all over Europe, for
its remains have been found in German and British caves as well as in the Pyrenees and the
south-east. To judge by the frequency with which its skeleton occurs, the cave bear must have
existed in stupendous numbers during the Ice Age. Just as the hyaena of today is allied to the
prehistoric cave hyaena, so the modern brown bear (Ursus aretos) is descended from the great
cave bear (Ursus spelaeus). Unlike the brown bear, however, the cave bear was a beast of
prey. It is also clear from the skeletons that the cave bear was considerably larger than the
brown bear. It was, in fact, a gigantic beast, as large as a bull, but with bones far more
ponderous than those of an ox, and huge muscles. Many of the skulls found show canine teeth
the size of bananas. When full-grown it reached a length of ten feet and stood five feet at the
shoulder. With its long, shaggy hair and five strong, non-retractile claws on each paw it must
have presented a truly terrifying sight. Norbert Casteret, who has devoted much study to
reconstructing the habits of these formidable beasts from their remains, points out that, secure
in their great strength, they had no need to drag their prey into caves like most animals, but
devoured it in the open air. This is evident from the fact that no food debris ever accompanies
the cave bear skeletons in caves.
One of the most noteworthy bear caverns in Europe is the Karlshohle at Erpfingen in the
Swabian Alps, discovered in 1834 by a school-teacher named Fauth. One particular cavern of
the Karlshohle was given the name 'Bears' Cave' because of the quantity of bears' skeletons
obtained from it. This cavern, a continuation of the Karlshohle, was not discovered until 1949.
The old Karlshohle is a stalactite cave; for many decades it was pillaged both of stalactite
formations and of remains of cave bear. The Bears' Cave escaped this fate, so that bear skulls
and skeletons may still be seen there in situ in great numbers. The Karlshohle comprises
seven great chambers, of which the first is twenty to thirty feet high and thirty to sixty feet
wide, while Hall VI, the finest of the lot and containing the greatest number of bear skele-
tons, is fifty feet high and seventy feet wide. Hall I, which is lit from above by the so-called
Fauth's Hole, is notable for the fact that a fifteen-feet-high pile of rubble underneath this hole
was found to contain no less than fifty human skeletons, believed to be those of plague
victims thrown down the shaft. They are accompanied by the bones of a quantity of domestic
animals. It looks as though the shaft had once been used by a knacker. Hall II contains an
ancient hearth with wood charcoal and the charred bones of deer and pig, evidence of human
occupation at some period.
The Karlshohle is a good example of a stalactite cave with splendid cascades, curtains, organ
pipes, embossments, cones, and lacework, many of them in bright colours. Hall VII is
geologically remarkable. In it stands a beetling crag which is not, like the rest of the cave,
white Jurassic limestone, but thick calcite interspersed with layers of biggish calcite crystals,
some of which are transparent or snow- white, while others are clouded and coloured by iron
com- pounds.
The Bears' Cave, which opens out of the Karlshohle and is reached by ascending a slope of
flowstone, was the true abode of the cave bear. A large number of bear skeletons lie beneath a
covering of flowstone (layers of calcite, which is crystalline calcium carbonate deposited from
thin films of saturated calcium carbonate solution, set hard after loss of carbon dioxide and
evaporation of water) at the entrance to the cavern. A three-feet-high hollow stalagmite of
calcite has formed on one pelvic bone. One of the finest and most impressive parts of the
cavern is the 'Great Half, measuring thirty-three feet in height and a hundred in width and
filled with stalactites and stalagmites, particularly the latter. A multitude of small straw
stalactites cover the ceiling, and at one point a row of longer stalactites betray a crack in the
rock through which the water perpetually seeps. The present floor of the cave is covered over
with flowstone, in which are embedded a large number of bear bones skulls, jawbones,
shoulder blades, spines, three pelvises, and thighbones. The complete skeleton of a bear
assembled by Professor von Huene of Tubingen University, from bones found on the spot,
stands in the centre of the cavern and adds to its impressiveness.
In the niche of the Great Hall, six bears' skulls were found one on top of the other. It is
thought that the bears used this cave to hibernate in. This is probably where their young were
born, and here they found their last resting-place. Amongst the chambers of the Bears' Cave,
in addition to the Great Hall, the 'Great Sinter Dome' is especially remarkable. A fifty-foot
vertical shaft leads into this cavern. In the course of the years, the water that poured down this
shaft, whirling sand and shingle along with it, has carved corkscrew forms in its walls. Today
this chimney issues in the topmost peak of the mountain.
The multitude of stalactite formations and the manifold shapes moulded by the deposition of
calcite, coupled with the wealth of cave bear remains, render the Erpfingen Bears' Cave an
unparalleled natural monument. It affords a direct and magnificent impression of the abode of
the most widely distributed of cave creatures, the cave bear, and of its physical structure.
Comparison of the mass-finds of cave bear in the Bears' Cave and other caverns in Europe as
far as the Caucasus, and in North Africa, with the finds of other greater or lesser beasts of
prey among its contemporaries, strongly suggests that the cave bear unlike modern beasts of
prey or the generally solitary bears of today was gregarious. It is clear that the cave was a
living-place, for among the bones of full-grown bears were many skeletons of half-grown
cubs or sucklings. This assumption is confirmed by finds in other caves, for example the
Nikolaushohle at Veringstadt, the cavern of Hohefels near Schelklingen, the Hepenloch at
Gutenburg, and the cave at Velburg in the Upper Palatinate. Many caves contained prodigious
quantities of bears' bones. The bone- and dung-impregnated cave earth of the Drachenhohle,
or Dragon's Cave, at Mixnitz in Styria, yielded so much high-grade phosphatic fertilizer that
sixty goods trains of fifty wagons each were needed to take it away.
Another region once inhabited by the cave bear, and still the haunt of its descendant the
brown bear, is the Pyrenees. Every major palaeontological collection in France contains a
complete skeleton of the cave bear, from which its great size may be seen. In the caverns of
the Pyrenees bear skeletons are found in clay, not, as at Balve, under flowstone. The wide
distribution of the finds and the depths to which the animal penetrated indicate that the bears
explored every corner of the cave systems. Norbert Casteret reports finding the mark of bears
claws on walls and floors covered with clay or delicate stalagmite deep in the heart of the
mountain and even in narrow vertical passages, or chimneys.
'In the caverns of Planque (Haute-Garonne),' writes Gasteret, 'two hundred and thirty feet
below ground, I found the skeletons of two bears which had fallen into one of the lower pits
with vertical walls, and which died of hunger after violently scratching the rock in attempts to
climb out.'
Similar clear traces have been found in many Pyrenean caves, including the famous Trois-
Frres and the 'oubliettes' of the caverns of Gargas and Montespan. The marks of bears' paws
in the clay, which has set hard with the passage of time, have been observed at many points.
In the cavern of the Tuc d'Audoubert, which was a favourite resort of the cave bear, Count
Begouen discovered what he has christened 'the bears' toboggan slide' a clay slope plunging
into what used to be a small pond, though it is now dry. There is every sign that the bears used
to go sliding down this slope and land in the muddy water. The marks of the hair of the bears'
fur are still visible in the once plastic clay. Arctic explorers have watched polar bears
indulging in this sport, to which seals are also addicted, on slopes of ice. Where opportunity
offers, they may be seen amusing themselves in this way in zoos.
Gasteret also reports that cave bear found diversion in the bear dance, as the modern bear does
today when bored by solitude or captivity. The bear dance consists in a perpetual rocking to
and fro with the head swaying in unison. Signs of this dance are visible in the cave of Pene-
Blanque (Haute-Garonne), 3,250 feet up in the Massif d'Arbas, in the shape of innumerable
overlapping prints of its four paws in the clay, made as it shifted restlessly from side to side
for hours on end during its long hibernation.
The number of artistic representations of the cave bear are surprisingly few in relation to its
obvious numbers and ubiquity. This is attributed by Casteret to the existence of some magical
taboo due to fear of the animal. He believes that 'the few depictions of cave bears which do
exist were plainly the work of witch-doctors specially authorized to draw the accursed
creature' .
The first representation of a cave bear was discovered by Dr. Garrigou in the Pyrenean Grotte
de Massat (Ariege), where a large number of bear skeletons were also found. It is an
engraving on a pebble of a bear rising on its hind legs in a menacing attitude, which is
enhanced by an expression of ferocity on the face.
Several other portrayals of bears have come to light. The cavern of Marsoulas contains a full-
face engraving, and a similar drawing engraved on a reindeer antler was found by the well-
known speleologist fidouard Lartet in the Grotte de Massat. It is now in the Toulouse
Museum. The cavern of Les Trois Freres, so often referred to already, also contains a drawing
of three bears on the rock wall. They have all been disfigured, probably in the course of some
obscure magic rite, and one of them is shown with a bison's tail and the spots of a leopard or
hyaena.
The cave bear must have been an almost invincible opponent to prehistoric man, with his
primitive weapons. When he succeeded in slaying one of these formidable monsters it meant
not only a welcome source of meat and clothing, but also the accomplishment of a truly heroic
deed. As an aid to the incantations designed to give them power over their adversary, the
ancient hunters did not content themselves with engraving the bear on the walls, but also
made three-dimensional or high relief representations of him carved in rock or modelled in
clay. Thus a small bear's head carved in rock has been found in the grotto of Isturitz (Basses-
Pyrenees), while a clay statue of a cave bear has been obtained from the cavern of Montespan.
The latter, which is headless and riddled with spear-holes, has evidently been mutilated in the
course of prehistoric magic rites.
There remains the question of how the cave bear died out. It is not likely to have been
exterminated by prehistoric man with his primitive weapons. Plenty of evidence points to its
extinction having been due to degenerative disease. A large number of diseased bones and the
remains of strikingly under-sized bears were found in the Drachenhohle at Mixnitz in Styria.
The prehistorian O. Abel concluded from this that the whole species of Ursus spelaeus
underwent a process of degeneration. 'Ursus spelaeus seems to have succumbed to a disease,
for no migration can be traced' confirms Norbert Casteret. He surmises that the cave bear fell
victim to a wave of extreme cold that swept across his habitat and brought with it
degenerative disease and malformation of the bones.
The Museum of Natural History at Toulouse possesses a unique collection of diseased bear
bones, in the shape of deformed jaws, joined vertebrae, shoulder blades encrusted with bony
tumours, and limb bones distorted by arthritis.
Just when this crippling malady developed and how long it took to wipe out the species
cannot be said for certain. It was probably a rapid process which took place when a period of
intense cold forced the bears to shelter for long periods in damp caves, where they contracted
rheumatism and gout.
The number of caves containing quantities of bear skulls, but no complete bear skeletons,
suggests human handiwork. The absence of any trace of man in these caves is not conclusive
evidence to the contrary. The drawings and models in the Pyrenean caves demonstrate that
man once used the caverns, in which bear remains have been found, for ritual purposes. In
many bear caverns the skulls of bears lie side by side on plinths or in niches in the cave walls.
This is the case in the Karlshohle Bears' Gave at Erpfingen, the well known caverns of the
northern Harz Mountains, and elsewhere. In the Drachenloch near Vattis, the
Wildmannlisloch on the Selun (Switzerland), and the Petershohle near Velden in central
Franconia bear skulls have even been found packed in a kind of box of stone slabs or piled up
in niches in the rock. These are certainly not hunting trophies, which would have been
displayed outside the cave. 'They are more likely to be evidence of a fully developed cult of
this animal, which was so useful to man, a totemistic cult in which the bear appears both as a
creature to be hunted and an object of veneration. Corresponding practices still live today
among modern hunting peoples in Northern Asia. It may therefore be assumed that many bear
caves were not places to which the bears went to give birth or die, but the sites of a cult that
approaches the earliest forms of religious thinking. (Professor Friedrich Behn in Die
Umschau, No. 22, 1950.)
We do not have to look as far back as the Ice Age to see the position occupied by the cave
bear. The ancient Greeks considered the bear the strongest animal of the forest and held it
sacred to the goddess Artemis. In ancient Nordic, Slav and Finnish popular belief the bear was
regarded as holy. As a symbol of strength it was sacred to Thor, who himself bore the name of
the beast : Bjorn. It was believed that the strength of the bear could be acquired from bear's
blood. In olden days curative powers were attributed to the teeth, fat, gall and claws of bears.
In the Middle Ages, bear hunting was still looked upon as a knightly exercise, and the
heraldic bears in the arms of the cities of Berlin, Bern and Bernburg no doubt date from that
time.
References
1. Bocherens, H. et al., 2004: Diet reconstruction of ancient brown bears (Ursus arctos)
from Mont Ventoux (France) using bone collagen stable isotope biogeochemistry
(13C, 15N), Can J Zool, 82:576-586.
2. Hedges R., Stevens R., Richards M., 2004: Bone as a stable isotope archive for local
climatic information, Quatern Sci Rev, 23:959-965.
doi:doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2003.06.022
3. Liden, A., Angerbjörn A., 1985: Dietary change and stable isotopes: a model of
growth and dormancy in cave bears, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B, 7 September 1999 vol. 266
no. 1430
4. Richards M. et al., 2008: Isotopic evidence for omnivory among European cave
bears: Late Pleistocene Ursus spelaeus from the Peçstera cu Oase, Romania, Proc Nat
Acad Sci USA, doi:10.1073/pnas.0711063105
5. Yuichi et al., 2016: Evidence for herbivorous cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) in Goyet
Cave, Belgium: implications for palaeodietary reconstruction of fossil bears using
amino acid δ15N approaches, Journal of Quaternary Science, 2016; DOI:
10.1002/jqs.2883
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I live in New South Wales, Australia, and I am a retired high school mathematics/science
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The Donsmaps site is totally independent of any other influence. I work on it for my own
pleasure, and finance it myself. I started before there was an internet, when I thought I could
do a better job of the small map on the end papers of Jean Auel's wonderful book, Valley of
the Horses, by adding detail and contour lines, and making a larger version. I have always
loved maps since I was a young boy.
I had just bought a black and white 'fat Mac' with a whopping 512 kB of memory (!), and no
hard disk. With a program called 'Super Paint' and a lot of double work (hand tracing first the
maps of Europe from atlases, then scanning the images on the tracing paper, then merging the
scanned images together, then tracing these digital scans on the computer screen), I made my
own black and white map.
Then the internet came along, the terms of my internet access gave me space for a small
website, and Don's Maps started. I got much better computers and software over the years,
Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for example, and my maps became colourised and had more
detail. I did a lot of maps of the travels of Ayla from Jean Auel's books, and I gradually
included other pages with more and more photos available from the web, and scanned from
books or from scientific papers, since I was not happy with the quality generally available. I
became very interested in the Venus figurines, and set out to make a complete record of the
ice age ones. Along the way I got interested in archaeology for its own sake.
In 2008 my wife and I went to Europe, and when we arrived in Frankfurt at sunrise after the
24 hour plane trip from Sydney, while my wife left on her own tour with her sister, they
visited relatives in Germany and Austria, I went off by myself on the train to Paris. Later that
afternoon I took a train to Brive-la-Gaillarde, found a hotel and caught up on lost sleep. The
next morning I hired a car, and over the next four weeks visited and photographed many of
the original archaeological sites in the south of France, as well as many archaeological
museums. It was a wonderful experience. My wife and I met up again later in the Black
Forest, and cycled down the Danube from its source to Budapest, camping most of the way, a
wonderful trip, collecting many photos, including a visit to Dolni Vestonice in the Czech
Republic, as well as visiting the Vienna natural history museum. Jean Auel fans will realise
the significance of that trip!
Luckily I speak French, the trips to France would have been difficult or impossible otherwise.
No one outside large cities speaks English (or they refuse to). I was travelling independently,
not as part of a tour group. I never knew where I was going to be the next night, and I camped
nearly everywhere, except for large cities. I am a very experienced bushwalker (hiker) and
have the required equipment - a one-man ultra lightweight tent, sleeping bag, stove, raincoat,
and so on, all of which I make myself for use here when I go bushwalking, especially down
the beautiful gorges east of Armidale, though for Europe I use a commercial two person
lightweight tent, since weight is not so much of a problem when cycling or using a car, and in
any case my wife was with me when cycling, once along the Donau from its source to
Budapest in 2008, and again from Amsterdam to Copenhagen and then up the Rhine from
Köln to the Black Forest in 2014, both of which were memorable and wonderful trips.
In 2012 we went to Canada for a wedding and to visit old friends, and I took the opportunity
to visit the wonderful Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where
I took many photographs of the items on exhibit, particularly of the superb display of artefacts
of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest.
In 2014 my wife and I did another European cycling tour, from Amsterdam to Copenhagen,
then from Cologne up the Rhine to the Black Forest, camping most of the way in each case,
and taking many useful photos in museums along the way, including the museums at Leiden,
Netherlands, and Roskilde in Denmark, and the National Museum in Copenhagen. Again, I
later hired a car and did more photography and visited many more sites in France.
In 2015 I made a lone visit to all the major museums in western Europe by public transport,
mostly by train, and that went very well. I had learned a lot of German while travelling with
my wife, who is a fluent speaker of the language, and of all the European countries, Germany
is my favourite. I feel comfortable there. I love the people, the food, and the beer. Germans
are gemütlich, I have many friends there now.
I repeated the visit to western Europe in 2018, to fill in some gaps of museums I had not
visited the first time, because they were either closed for renovation the first time (such as the
Musée de l'Homme in Paris) or because I ran out of time, or because I wanted to fill in some
gaps from major museums such as the British Museum, the Berlin Museum, München, the
Louvre, the Petrie and Natural History Museums in London, the Vienna Natural History
Museum, the important museum in Brno, and museums in northern Germany. It takes at least
two visits, preferably three, to thoroughly explore the items on display in a major museum.
I spend a lot of time on the site, typically at least a few hours a day, often more. I do a lot of
translation of original papers not available in English, a time consuming but I believe a
valuable task. People and fate have been very generous to me, and it is good to give back a
very small part of what I have been given. With the help of online translation apps and use of
online dictionaries there are few languages I cannot translate, though I find Czech a
challenge!
I will never be able to put up all the photos I have taken, each photo needs a lot of research,
typically, to put it in context on the site. I do not have enough time left, life is short and death
is long, but I am going to give it a good shot!
Life has been kind to me, I want for nothing, and am in good health. Not many in the world
are as lucky as I am, and I am grateful for my good fortune.
My best wishes to all who read and enjoy the pages of my site.
May the road rise up to meet you.

May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
And may rain on a tin roof lull you to sleep at night.
Webmaster: Don Hitchcock
Email: don@donsmaps.com
Website last updated Monday 26 February 2024

The Bear and Cavebear in Fact, Myth and Legend

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The Bear and Cavebear in Fact, Myth and Legend

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Recent additions, changes and updates to Don's Maps

 Abel Tasman Track in New Zealand

Back to Don's Maps

The bear and cavebear in fact, myth and

Cave Bear skeleton in the Vienna Natural

Note the ridge down the top centre of the

Photo: Don Hitchock 2008

The cave bear had a very

Photo: Don Hitchock 2008

Cave bear juvenile.

Cave bears of the last ice age

Photo: Don Hitchock 2008

Cave bear juvenile.

There is some evidence that

Photo: Don Hitchock 2008

A cave bear baby.

Cave bears (Ursus spelaeus)

Photo: Don Hitchock 2008

I suspect this is meant

Photo: Don Hitchcock

The Grizzly Bear - Ursus arctos horribilus

Bears are found on every continent except Australia and Antarctica.

Life restoration of Ursavus, the earliest bear, by Margaret

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Paleogeographic map of Europe in mid-Miocene times, about

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Upper cheek teeth of various bears, showing the progressive

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Skull of the Etruscan bear,

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976,

Accompanying this change there is a tendency to a doming of the forehead, foreshadowing

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Geography of Europe in Weichselian times shows the northern parts of the

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

British river scene in the Eemian interglacial, with cave hyenas,

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Cave Bears were vegans

Text above from: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160823083557.htm

How carnivorous were cave bears?

Charles Q. Choi reports on a new paper by Michael Richards and colleagues:

There is also this:

Genetic Affinities. To provide additional confirmation of the morphological evidence,

Bocherens et al. (2004)

Recovering genetic material from ancient remains is fraught

Photograph copyright Gernot Rabeder, Institute of Paleontology,

What about sequencing the DNA from dinosaur fossils?

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Cave Bear canine teeth

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Cross section of the Drachenloch Cave as published by Bachler in 1923,

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Cross section of Drachenloch Cave as given by Bachler in 1940.

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'

An amazing similarity exists