Robert E. Bieder - Bear

On a bright, hot, June morning, in the company of Professor Lszl Kordos, paleontologist and Head of the Geological Museum of Hungary, and Professor Zoltn Abdi-Nagy of the University of Debrecen, I climbed a well-worn path to the large limestone Istllsko cave. Zoltn, an old friend, had put me in touch with Professor Kordos. After I spent some days studying cave bear skulls at the museum, Lszl suggested a trip to the Bkk Mountains in northeastern Hungary to visit the Istllsko cave, the source of some of the cave bear remains that I had been looking at. This beautiful limestone mountain range with cascading streams extends along the border between Hungary and Slovakia. With other ranges it marks the northern limits of the Carpathian basin.

On either side of our narrow path, beech and pine trees marched up the hillside in irregular order and provided welcome shade. As we rounded a rock outcrop, suddenly the cave loomed into sight. We passed into the cave through an awesome portal reminiscent of the grand entrance into the banquet hall of Griegs Hall of the Mountain King. On either side, the walls arched like a Gothic cathedral toward the ceiling while the uneven sandy floor sloped away, losing itself in the dark, cool shadows in the rear. The site of several successful digs for cave bear remains, the cave is about 100 feet deep and only half its original length, the front half having long ago collapsed down the mountain. Our search along the walls of the cave, where bone fragments or molars would most probably be found, proved unsuccessful.

The cave bear, now extinct, disappeared only about 15,000 years ago, but did the hills I looked out on from the mouth of the cave hold the bones of bears that lived long before cave bears? How many species of bears wandered over the earth between the first bear and the cave bear? How did bears evolve?

The history of bears is measured in geological terms of millions of years; time spans often punctuated by ice ages when glaciers miles high covered much of the northern hemisphere and interglacial periods when the great ice sheets retreated. But the story of bears begins even before the glacial age, in the early Miocene, one of the great divisions of the Tertiary period, about 22 million years ago, when the first bear ancestor emerged in what later would become Europe.

What did Ursavus see? Certainly not the Europe we know today. Europe for the most part was a sub-tropical land mass. Britain was firmly attached to the continent by a land bridge to France. The Iberian Peninsula extended further both east and west. The Mediterranean Sea nearly covered Italy and bit deep into the coasts of France, Greece and Turkey. Warm breezes from the Atlantic, narrower than it is today, blew moisture across Europe that created lush tropical forests. Scandinavia and Finland were attached to Europe and the Baltic Sea was far in the future. Between Britain and Scandinavia a cold sea extended southward covering what is now part of the north German coast and most of Denmark. The Alps were just pushing up, forming a land mass between the Mediterranean and a large freshwater lake to the north. To the east of this lake, from southern France to Austria, a vast brackish sea covered much of southern Europe and extended into Asia, while a vast swamp covered northeastern Germany and Poland.

Paleontologists today see an explosion of essentially modern life forms during this period. At the end of the Oligocene, the period before the Miocene, about 25 million years ago, many of the creatures that inhabited that earlier world slid into extinction. But some creatures, including some mammals, continued into the Miocene, contributing to the rich variety of terrestrial life that characterized that period. The many limestone caves in western and central Europe served as homes for an array of creatures, including bear-dogs, weasels, foxes, skunk-like animals, early ancestors of the mongoose and numerous other small mammals, birds and reptiles. Among these creatures was one about the size of a fox terrier; scientists have named it Ursavus elemensis, sometimes called the dawn bear. Many scientists see this creature as the beginning of the bear line.

Of all the physical remains of bears, probably the most important are teeth. When very old remains are found, bones may have largely disintegrated but the teeth (of all body parts the hardest) and their order in the skull, are often the only clue to species identification. In bear remains the teeth, especially the molars, can tell us not only what subspecies it belonged to, but something about the age of the animal when death occurred, its mode of life, and its eating pattern.

In time, dawn bear changed, but so did its world. Larger neighbours, mastodons, pushed into Europe from Africa, and the one-toed or hoofed horse, that would soon replace the three-toed horse, ambled in from North America. At a site called Can Llobateres, near the Spanish city of Sabadell just northeast of Barcelona, bones of several mammals including, gibbons and apes, provided proof that about 13 million years ago the region was still subtropical in climate and flora.