The Historic Grizzly

[brotherbear]

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American attitudes toward wildlife like bears by the Jeffersonian Age were complex and deeply internalized across thousands of years of human history. Genetic programming from as far back as the Paleolithic obviously preserves a human memory of giant bears. Mammals of the Northern Hemisphere, they would have been a new thing for modern humans migrating out of Africa and into Europe and Asia 45,000 years ago. Our Neanderthal ancestors would have long since been familiar with bears, but our own species likely first confronted them in southern Europe. Among the oldest painted art locales anywhere in the world, the walls of Chauvet Cave in the Ardeche Valley of southern France preserve images that may be 37,000 years old. The large paintings here breathtakingly represent cave bears along with bison, horses, rhinos, lions, mammoths, and ibex. Indeed Chauvet Cave was a cave bear den. When Spelunkers discovered the site in 1994, the Chauvet floor preserved bear skeletons, bear footprints that looked days old, and a cave bear skull the ancient artists had placed atop a boulder as a kind of shrine. Cave bears were formidable beasts as large or larger than grizzlies.  Reply