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Man and Bear in Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Colin Matheson
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Extract

The faunal environment of man, as is well known, has profoundly affected his mental as well as his physical life. The Altamira and other animal-drawings made by Palaeolithic man, whether regarded as disinterested efforts at pure art or as magical symbols intended to ensure success in the chase, are sufficient evidence of the extent to which the cave bear, the bison, the mammoth, and other great beasts figured in the minds of their human contemporaries. Professor Othenio Abel considers that Mousterian man associated certain cult-conceptions with the bears he had killed, and kindred ideas are still found in remote parts of the world. Finds of actual bear remains in more or less clear association with human remains or artifacts are of course numerous. Confining ourselves to Great Britain, bones attributed to Ursus spelaeus were ‘ very common ’ at Paviland cave, Glamorgan, which yielded also artifacts covering the period from Mousterian to the end of Aurignacian times. Cat’s Hole, Long Hole, and Hoyle’s Mouth, all in South Wales ; Kent’s cavern in Devonshire ; King Arthur’s cave in the Wye valley ; Aveline’s Hole, Gough’s cave, and Wookey Hole in the Mendips ; Ffynnon Beuno cave in the vale of Clwyd ; the Victoria cave in Yorkshire ; Creswell Crags and Langwith cave in Derbyshire ; are other sites which have yielded both remains of bear and human artifacts of various periods.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 16 , Issue 62 , June 1942 , pp. 151 - 159
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1942

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References

1 ‘The Pleistocene Mammals and their Relations to the Religion of the Palaeolithic Man of Europe’, Proc. Linn. Soc. London, 1934-5, pp. 58-70.

2 Garrod, The Upper Palaeolithic Age in Britain, 1927 ; and references therein.

3 Professor S. H. Reynolds in British Pleistocene Mammalia, vol. 2, after a thorough examination of all available British remains of Pleistocene bears, will not commit himself further than to state that the differences separating the cave bear from the others are certainly greater than those between the different bears of the arctos type, but, unless perhaps in the case of the fourth premolar tooth, ‘it is doubtful whether they are sufficiently marked and constant to afford specific distinctions. Certainly all the species of Pleistocene bears are closely allied and tend to run into one another, and it is perhaps not a matter of much practical importance whether they are grouped as one, two, or three species. On the whole it has seemed most satisfactory to recognise the specific distinction of U. spelaeus, while grouping all the other Pleistocene bears as U. arctos’.

4 Vorzeitliche Lebensspuren, 1935, pp. 582-93.

5 American Naturalist, 1906, XL.

6 See footnote 1.

6A Siberian Man and Mammoth (trans, by Muriel D. Simpson) 1939, p. 114.

7 ‘Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere’, American Anthropologist, 1926, pp. 1-175. See also Jennison, Noah’s Cargo, 1928, pp. 189-202.

8 The association of erotic legends with the bear even among Christian and other peoples where there is no question of ceremonial cults, is remarkably widespread both in space and in time. Thus Edward Topsell, in his History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents (largely a translation of Conrad Gesner’s German work of about 1550) informs us that ‘a bear is of a most venereous and lustful disposition’; and quotes in detail a case ‘most confidently’ told him, of a bear in the mountains of Savoy which carried away a girl to his den for a mate. A precisely similar type of story has been current up to modern times in so distant a region as the Himalayas—‘The occasional abduction of women from the villages by bears is firmly believed in’, says Major-General Donald Macintyre in his Hindu-Koh, 1889, p. 26.

9 ‘Animaux disparus de la faune d’Alsace’, Bulletin de l’Association Philomathique d’Alsace et de Lorraine, 1924, tome VI, fasc. 6, pp. 303-13.

10 Caziot, ‘L’Ours, brun dans les Alpes-Maritimes’, Annales de la Société Linnéenne de Lyon, 1920, LXV, 33-35.

11 Feuillée-Billot, La Nature, 1932, II, 551–56.

12 Barclay, Big Game Shooting Records, 1932, p. 164.

13 Bulletin de la Société Fribourgeoise des Sciences Naturelles, Compte-Rendu 1893-7, VII, 60-82.

14 British Animals Extinct within Historic Times, 1880, pp. 11-32.

15 Journal of Mammalogy, 1930, p. 508.

16 Barclay, op. cit. pp. 224-7.

17 Jennison, Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome, 1937 ; and references therein.

18 Second edition, 1902, vol. 1, p. 252.

19 Belden, The Fur Trade of America, 1917, pp. 444, 502.

20Lydekker, Royal Natural History, 1894, vol. 2, p. 5, quoting Nordenskiöld.

21 Henderson and Craig, Economic Mammalogy, 1932, p. 59.