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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 H, Argant A, Argant J, Billiou D, Crégut-Bonnoure E, Donat-Ayache B, Philippe M, Thinon M. 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.
Hedges REM, Stevens RE, Richards MP. 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
Richards MP, Pacher M, Stiller M, Quilès J, Hofreiter M, Constantin S, Zilhão J, Trinkaus E. 2008. Isotopic evidence for omnivory among European cave bears: Late Pleistocene Ursus spelaeus from the Peçstera cu Oase, Romania. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA (online early) doi:10.1073/pnas.0711063105
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
Photo: http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/landofmammoth/eyecandy/main.html
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.
To his surprise, Bachler came to realize that the skulls and bones were by no means scattered haphazardly. On the contrary, they seemed to be oriented rigidly in certain preferred directions. Could they have been deliberately placed by man? Soon there were further discoveries that made Bachler sure.
The finds in the Drachenloch were reported by Bachler in 1923 and in another report that he published seventeen years later. The most remarkable find was that of a large stone coffin or chest, containing a group of cave bear skulls and covered by a large stone slab. All of the skulls were pointing the same way. The coffin was about three feet (I metre) high; the sides consisted of limestone slabs, which, like the cover, had originally fallen down from the ceiling of the cave. Unfortunately, in the course of the excavation, workmen destroyed the chests, and no photographs were taken.
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.
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'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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
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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
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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.
Reconstructed 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'
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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'
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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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
Life Table for the Cave Bear (Ursus spelaeus)
Population from
Odessa
From: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
x
Age
Interval
| dx
Deaths
During
Interval
| lx
Living at
Beginning of
Interval
| I000 qx
Rate of
Mortality
| ex
Expectation
of Life
|
| 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.
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The Kodiak Bear, thought by most to be the largest bear - Ursus arctos middendorffi
Photo: http://lsb.syr.edu/projects/cyberzoo/kodiakbear.html
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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.
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An Orochon in hunting garb. The Orochon are breeders and hunters of reindeer whose nomadic culture and economy are based entirely on that animal. Even their name reflects this. On the left is an old musket, on the right a palma, the wooden shaft surmounted by a blade with which the Orochon formerly hunted bear.
Photo: Lissner - Man, God and Magic
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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.
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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.
Photo: Lissner - Man, God and Magic
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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.
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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.
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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.
Photo: Lissner - Man, God and Magic
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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.
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The approach to the Drachenloch cave
Photo: Christian Mettler http://www.drachenloch.ch/
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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/
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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/
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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.
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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.
Photo: Lissner - Man, God and Magic
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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.
Photo: Bjorn Kurten, 1976, 'The Cave Bear Story'
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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'
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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.
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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.
Photo: Lissner - Man, God and Magic
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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
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.
