Mortality analysis of Pleistocene bears and its paleoanthropological relevance

Journal of Human Evolution
Mary C Stiner

Abstract

Bear bones and Paleolithic stone artefacts often co-occur in Pleistocene cave deposits of Eurasia, raising the question of how these associations come about and the need for effective methods with which to obtain a clear answer. Building upon knowledge of modern bears, I present a method for testing two competing hypotheses about the causes of bear mortality in hibernation contexts. The first hypothesis proposes that age-dependent deaths resulted from non-violent causes (principally starvation), implying that bears' presence in a cave was not linked in time to human activities there. The second hypothesis proposes that random bear deaths in caves resulted from hunting by humans or other large predators, implying a temporal link between them; the expectation of a nonselective age pattern in this circumstance arises from the fact that the individual characters of hibernating bears are hidden from predators. Three elements of the method and its development are presented: (1) a brief review of the biological bases of hibernation-related mortality in modern Ursus, its paleontological consequences, and test expectations drawn therefrom; (2) a detailed, illustrated technique for age-scoring isolated bear cheek teeth based on tooth eru...Continue Reading

References

Sep 1, 1986·The American Journal of Sports Medicine·J G Gamble

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Citations

Mar 1, 2006·Journal of Human Evolution·Steve Wolverton
Sep 25, 1999·Journal of Human Evolution·J C DíezI Cáceres
May 26, 2001·Proceedings. Biological Sciences·D Fernández-MosqueraA Grandal-d'Anglade
Nov 4, 2015·BMC Evolutionary Biology·Manuela FuchsMarcelo R Sánchez-Villagra
Feb 26, 2020·PeerJ·Nicole L Ackermans

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