Click on the photos to see an enlarged version
Many of these photographs 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
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Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
Life restoration of Ursavus, the earliest bear, by Margaret Lambert.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
Paleogeographic map of Europe in mid-Miocene times, about 20 million years ago, shows a continent still partitioned by great interior seas and lakes.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
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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'
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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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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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.
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.
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.
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.