Cave bears killed by Ice Age, not hunters: study
Date: 27-Nov-08
Country: NORWAY
Cave bears killed by Ice Age, not hunters: study Photo: Joint Genome
Institute/Handout
The skull of an extinct cave bear in an undated image. Giant cave bears
froze to death during the last Ice Age in Europe about 28,000 years ago,
according to a study on Wednesday that cleared human hunters of driving them
to extinction thousands of years
Photo:
Joint Genome Institute/Handout
OSLO - Giant cave bears froze to death during the last Ice Age in Europe
about 28,000 years ago, according to a study on Wednesday that cleared human
hunters of driving them to extinction thousands of years later.
The largely vegetarian bears, weighing up to a ton and bigger than modern
polar bears or Kodiak bears, apparently died off as a sharp cooling of the
climate led to a freeze that killed off the fruits, nuts and plants they
ate.
The bears vanished 27,800 years ago, or about 13,000 years earlier than
previously believed, the scientists in Austria and Britain said in a study
of bear remains using radiocarbon dating including at hibernation sites in
the Alps.
"There is little convincing evidence so far of human involvement in
extinction of the cave bear," they wrote in the journal Boreas. Some past
reports have suggested that the cave bears' demise was linked to
over-hunting.
Cave bears ranged from what is now Spain to the Ural Mountains, and were one
of several large creatures -- such as the woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros,
giant deer and cave lion -- to vanish during the Ice Age that ended 10,000
years ago.
"Our work shows that the cave bear ... was one of the earliest to
disappear," Martina Pacher, one of the co-authors at the University of
Vienna, said in a statement.
"Other, later extinctions happened at different times within the last 15,000
years," she said. Previous studies had errors in dating samples and
sometimes confused remains of cave bears with those of brown bears, which
still survive.
"A fundamental question to be answered by future research is: why did the
brown bear survive to the present day, while the cave bear did not?" said
Anthony Stuart, the other author at the Natural History Museum in London.
Answers might involve differing diets, hibernation habits, geographical
ranges, habitat and perhaps hunting by people, he said.
(For Reuters latest environment blogs go to: blogs.reuters.com/environment/)
(Editing by Richard Williams)
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