Bears as Predators ~

[brobear]

Perhaps also, there was more game such as deer and boar. Perhaps also wolves. Just guessing. Edit and add: Thomas did some searching. Too much time has passed and he cannot relocate the Old Roman Games recorded and translated. I was also interested. But we do know they exist. 
 
*Another edit and add: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/short-his...therington 
 
A short history of Scotland's bears

Published on May 16, 2016

Following on from my previous post about Scotland's extinct elks, I thought I'd follow it up with another, this time on our long-lost brown bears.

We know from a variety of sources that Scotland once had brown bears. Firstly, their bones have been discovered at a variety of sites, from Dumfriesshire in the extreme south to Caithness in the far north. This includes a near complete skeleton found in the bone caves near Inchnadamph in the north west corner of the Highlands (where my profile photo was taken). The youngest carbon-date so far from these bones was around 2700 years old. As with the elks, this shouldn't be interpreted as being the date of their extinction in Scotland. The cultural evidence suggests a much more recent occurrence here.

We know from the surviving works of Roman writers that bears from Caledonia were revered and prized in the arena for their large size and ferocity. Indeed during the opening festivities of the Coliseum in AD80, a Caledonian bear was unleashed on a bound and defenceless criminal for the entertainment of 50,000 people!

Bears were also depicted on several Pictish stone carvings dating from around the 8th and 9th centuries AD, including from Shetland, Easter Ross, Angus and Perthshire. The Gaelic word for bear is mathan. This has given us the modern Scottish surname of Mathieson, which is an anglicisation of MacMathan, literally 'Son of Bear'.

We don't know exactly when bears became extinct in Scotland, but it's likely they fell victim, perhaps in the later Middle Ages, to a mixture of deforestation, over-hunting and persecution arising from their likely attacks on livestock. The Cairngorms area may have been the last part of Britain to retain landscape-scale woodland cover, and could well have been the last stronghold of the Scottish, and indeed British, bear.

However, the most recent example of a free-ranging member of this species to wander the wilds of Scotland (just as with the elk curiously enough) was an escaped male named Hercules. While being filmed for a TV advert on Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides in 1980, Hercules the tame bear gave his handler, Andy Robin, the slip and went missing for over 3 weeks. He was eventually spotted swimming in the sea, tranquilised and then reunited with Andy, very hungry but otherwise unharmed. Reply