Cave lions. The cave lion is an ancient predator. Habitats and hunting

Of all times. Previously, its status was not entirely clear, but today it is considered a clearly distinguishable subspecies modern lions. It was first described by the German physician and naturalist Georg August Goldfus, who found the skull of a cave lion in the Franconian Alb.

In Soviet paleontology, on the initiative of Nikolai Vereshchagin, the cave lion was called tigrolev.

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Spreading

In Europe, the first lions appeared about 700,000 years ago and belonged to the subspecies Panthera leo fossilis, the so-called Mosbach lion. The fact that it is sometimes also called the cave lion can be misleading. As a rule, the term cave lion refers to a later subspecies Panthera leo spelaea. Mosbach lions reached a length of up to 2.4 m excluding the tail and were half a meter larger than modern lions. They were the size of a liger. From this large subspecies came the cave lion, which appeared about 300,000 years ago. It was distributed throughout northern Eurasia and even during the glaciations penetrated deep to the north. In the northeast of Eurasia, a separate subspecies has formed, the so-called East Siberian cave lion ( Panthera leo vereshchagini), which reached the American continent through the then existing land connection between Chukotka and Alaska. Spreading south, it evolved into the American lion ( Panthera leo atrox). The East Siberian cave lion became extinct at the end of the last major glaciation about 10 thousand years ago. The European cave lion probably became extinct during the same period, but it is possible that it persisted for some time on the Balkan Peninsula. Regarding the lions that existed on it until the beginning of our era, it is unknown whether they were cave lions.

Appearance

The skeleton of an adult male cave lion, found in 1985 near Siegsdorf, Germany, had a height at the withers of 1.20 m and a length of 2.1 m excluding the tail. This corresponds to a very large modern lion. At the same time, the Siegsdorf lion was inferior to many of its relatives. Cave lions were on average 5-10% superior to modern lions, but did not reach huge size Mosbach lions and American Lions. Rock paintings from the Stone Age allow us to draw some conclusions about the coloring of the fur and mane of the cave lion. Particularly impressive images of lions were found in southern France in the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche department, as well as in the Vogelherdhöhle cave in the Swabian Alb. Ancient drawings cave lions They are always shown without a mane, which suggests that, unlike their African or Indian relatives, they either did not have one, or it was not so impressive. Often this image shows the characteristic tuft on the tail of lions. The coloring of the fur, apparently, was one color.

Lifestyle

Relatives

Unlike the Mosbach lion, regarding the classification of which as Panthera leo fossilis There has always been unanimity among scientists; there has been a long debate about the cave lion, whether it is a lion, a tiger, or even whether it should be distinguished as a separate species. In 2004 ( P.l. vereshchagini) and American lion ( P.l. atrox). All modern subspecies of lions belong to the group Leo. Both groups separated about 600 thousand years ago. Some fossil specimens of the extinct American lion were larger than the Mosbach lion and were thus among the largest felines that ever existed. Previously they were considered a separate species called the giant jaguar. According to the latest research, the American lion, like the cave lion, was not a separate species, but a subspecies of lions (

During excavations in northern Kenya international group scientists discovered the remains of a lion that lived in Africa more than 200 thousand years ago during the Pleistocene era. The study revealed that the animal was much larger than its long-extinct and living African relatives. Dedicated work published in the Journal of Paleontology.

African cave lions were as tall as a man

American and Kenyan experts measured the size of the skull and teeth of a lion that lived in Kenya more than 200 thousand years ago. It turned out that the animal was several times larger than its African relatives and reached the size of Pleistocene lions from America, Europe and Siberia. Scientists believe that this subspecies was previously unknown to science.

“This skull is the first evidence that giant lions existed in the middle and late Pleistocene in eastern Africa, whose size may have been due to greater mass megafauna (a set of animal species whose body weight exceeds 40-45 kg), the authors of the work believe. - The skull is remarkable for its large size, equal to the parameters of the largest cave lion skull in Eurasia and much larger than the known skulls from Africa,” they conclude.

Cave lions

Note that Pleistocene lions living in the north, namely in America, Europe and Eastern Siberia, were very different from lions from Africa and South-East Asia. In particular, they were 1.5 times larger than their southern relatives.

The Mosbach lion, living in Eurasia, is considered the largest cat known to science today. By the way, it reached a length of 3.7 m and weighed 400-430 kg. The American lion was not much smaller than the Mosbach lion: the length of its body including its tail reached 3.7 m, and it weighed about 400 kg. East Siberian lionweighed 180-270 kg and reached a length of 2.40 m without a tail.

Cave lions - ancient predators - did not get their name because they lived in dark and cold caves. Indeed, they hid in caves during the period when they were expecting the birth of offspring. However, their favorite habitats were, according to modern paleontologists, the endless steppe plains that stretched to the very horizon. Cave lions thrived in such semi-desert areas, on the hottest days escaping the scorching rays of the sun under small branches of bushes and small trees.

The animals got their name – “cave lion” – due to the fact that scientists often found images of a predator on the walls of ancient caves. Currently, paleontologists have discovered many areas in various countries world, the walls of the caves are decorated with drawings made by Stone Age people. Similar drawings were found in grottoes in England, Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Algeria and Syria. In the CIS a large number of images of lions were discovered in an area stretching from the Caucasus to Chukotka and Primorye. A special place in such drawings is given to the image of a dexterous and swift predator - the cave lion. It was thanks to the presence of ancient drawings that modern scientists received evidence of the existence of this animal on the planet.

Cave lions lived on the planet at a time when the very climate of the Earth, warm and mild, and the abundance of food prepared the conditions for the formation new form life - predators. At that time, mammoths, yaks, donkeys, deer, camels and bison became victims of lions. Their tasty and tender meat was the basis of the diet of ferocious predators. Their favorite delicacy was horses and kulans, which, thanks to strong legs, the lions did not have much difficulty.

As you know, with climate change on Earth and global cooling, most animals were forced to migrate to southern, warmer areas. However, cave lions were in no hurry to leave their already inhabited places.

Scientists say that lions have long lived in Transcaucasia. They could be seen there in ancient times. In addition, it is known that to the prince of Kyiv Vladimir Monomakh even had to fight one such predator. Judging by the surviving written monuments, then lions lived even in the lower reaches of the Don. However, according to paleontologists, cave lions disappeared 10-12 million years ago.

According to scientists, the entire body of cave lions was covered with short, monochromatic hair. Most likely, the animals were colored, like modern pumas and lions, in sand or clay tones that blended with the color of the landscape around them: sun-bleached steppes in summer and snow-covered desert river valleys in winter.

Ancient predators were fast, agile and very intelligent creatures. How could it be otherwise? After all, it was necessary to obtain living food. They became the top of the evolutionary chain: plants - herbivores - predators.

The German paleontologist Goldfus described the skull of a large cat, the size of a lion, found in 1810 in a cave in Franconia (Bass, middle Rhine) under the name Felis spelaea, i.e. “cave cats”. Later, similar skulls and other bones were found and described in North America under the name Felis atrox, i.e. “terrible cat.” Then they found the remains of cave lions in Siberia, the Southern and Northern Urals, the Crimea and the Caucasus. Meanwhile, the figure of a cave lion in the harsh landscapes of icy Europe, and even more so in Siberia, with its bitter frosts, seemed as fantastic as the figure of an elephant, and aroused doubts and reflections among specialists. After all, we are accustomed to associate the lion with the hot savannas and jungles of India and Africa, the semi-deserts of Asia Minor and Arabia. Was such a large cat really found at the same time and together with hairy mammoths, the same rhinoceroses, fluffy reindeer, shaggy bison and musk oxen in Northern Europe, Asia, Alaska and America?

Since the last century, some paleontologists believed that Quaternary period cave lions and tits lived in Europe, others - that there were ordinary and cave lions, but there were no tigers, others - that lions of African origin lived in Europe and Northern Asia. They lived in the Balkans until the time of Aristotle and attacked Persian caravans in Thrace, and later survived only in South Asia and Africa. Finally, due to the fact that the ancient Greeks and Romans brought tens and hundreds of lions from Africa and Asia Minor for circus and combat purposes, such animals could have been imported to Europe - escaped from menageries.

There were vague ideas about the habitat of lions and tigers in both Siberia and North America. After the Siberian paleontologist I.D. Chersky identified the femur of a cat from the mouth of the Lena as a tiger, our zoologists began to write that tigers had spread earlier before Arctic Ocean, and now they only enter southern Yakutia as far as Aldan. Czech zoologist V. Mazak even placed the homeland of tigers in the Amur-Ussuri region. American paleontologists Maryem and Stock, having studied the skeletons and skulls of terrible lions that fell into asphalt pits in California 15 thousand years ago, believed that these lions were, firstly, similar to Eurasian ones, and secondly, descended from the American jaguar ( I).

There is, however, an opinion that in the Pleistocene the composition mammoth fauna lived special kind giant cat- cave lion (Vereshchagin, 1971).

Some scientists believe that cave lions looked more like tigers and had transverse tiger stripes on their sides. This opinion is clearly erroneous. Modern southern cats - tiger, lynx, puma, settling north into the taiga zone, lose their bright stripes and spots, acquiring a pale color, which helps them camouflage in winter against the background of dull northern landscapes. While carving the outlines of cave lions on the walls of the caves, the ancient artists did not make a single hint about the spots or stripes covering the body or tail of these predators. Most likely, cave lions were colored like modern lionesses or pumas - in sandy-violet tones.

The distribution of cave lions in the late Pleistocene was enormous - from the British Isles and the Caucasus to the New Siberian Islands, Chukotka and Primorye. And in America - from Alaska to Mexico.

These animals were called cave animals, perhaps in vain. Where there was food and caves, they willingly used the latter for resting and raising their young, but on the plains steppe zone and in the high-latitude Arctic they were content with small canopies and thickets of bushes. Judging by the fact that the bones of these northern lions are found in geological layers along with the bones of mammoths, horses, donkeys, deer, camels, saigas, primitive aurochs and bison, yaks and musk oxen, there is no doubt that lions attacked these animals and ate their meat . By analogy with modern examples from the savannas of Africa, one can think that the favorite food of our northern lions were horses and kulans, which they lay in wait at watering holes or caught among bushes and in the steppes. They overtook their prey with a short throw at a distance of a few hundred meters. It is possible that they also organized collective hunts in temporary friendly groups, dividing into beaters and ambushers, as modern lions in Africa do. There is practically no information about the reproduction of cave lions, but one can think that they had no more than two or three cubs.

In Transcaucasia, Northern China and Primorye, cave lions lived together with tigers and, obviously, competed with them.

In the book by J. Roni (senior) “The Fight for Fire” (1958) there is a description of the battle of young hunters with a tigress and a cave lion. These battles were probably rarely without casualties. The weapons of our ancestors in the Stone Age were not very reliable for battles with such a dangerous animal (Fig. 17). Lions could also fall into trapping pits, as well as into pressure traps such as kulema. The hunter who killed the cave lion was probably considered a hero and proudly wore its skin on his shoulder and drilled fangs on his neck. Pieces of marl with images of lion heads, found in the layers of the Paleolithic site of Kostenki I south of Voronezh, probably served as amulets. At the sites of Kostenki IV and XIII, skulls of cave lions were found, kept in huts reinforced with mammoth bones. The skulls were probably placed on the roofs of dwellings or hung on stakes or trees - they were intended to play the role of “guardian angel”.

Cave lion, apparently, did not live to see the historical era; it became extinct over large areas along with other characteristic members of the mammoth fauna - mammoth, horse, bison.

Lions could have stayed somewhat longer in Transbaikalia, Buryat-Mongolia, and Northern China, where an abundance of various ungulates was still preserved. Some stone sculptures of lion-like monsters made by the ancient Manchus and Chinese in Jilin and other cities of Xinjiang may have depicted the last cave lions that survived here until the European Middle Ages.

Spreading

In Europe, the first lions appeared about 700,000 years ago and belonged to the subspecies Panthera leo fossilis, the so-called Mosbach lion. The fact that it is sometimes also called the cave lion can be misleading. As a rule, the term cave lion refers to a later subspecies Panthera leo spelaea. Mosbach lions reached a length of up to 2.4 m excluding the tail, and were half a meter larger than modern lions. They were similar in size to a liger, a hybrid of a lion and a tigress. From this large subspecies came the cave lion, which appeared about 300,000 years ago. It was distributed throughout northern Eurasia and even during the Ice Ages penetrated deep into the north. In the northeast of Eurasia, a separate subspecies has formed, the so-called East Siberian cave lion ( Panthera leo vereshchagini), which reached the American continent through the then existing land connection between Chukotka and Alaska. Spreading south, it evolved into the American lion ( Panthera leo atrox). The East Siberian cave lion became extinct at the end of the last major glaciation about 10 thousand years ago. The European cave lion probably became extinct during the same period, but it is possible that it persisted for some time on the Balkan Peninsula. Regarding the lions that existed on it until the beginning of our era, it is unknown whether they were cave lions.

Appearance

Fossil skull

The skeleton of an adult male cave lion, found in 1985 near Siegsdorf, Germany, had a height at the withers of 1.20 m and a length of 2.1 m excluding the tail. This corresponds to a very large modern lion. At the same time, the Siegsdorf lion was inferior to many of its relatives. Cave lions were on average 5-10% larger than modern lions, but did not reach the enormous size of Mosbach lions and American lions. Stone Age cave paintings allow us to draw some conclusions about the coloring of the fur and mane of the cave lion. Particularly impressive images of lions were found in southern France in the Chauvet cave in the Ardèche department, as well as in the Vogelherdhöle cave in the Swabian Alb. Ancient drawings of cave lions always show them without a mane, which suggests that, unlike their African or Indian relatives, they either did not have one, or it was not as impressive. Often these images show the characteristic tuft on the tail of lions. The coloring of the fur, apparently, was one color.

Lifestyle

Cave lions on the hunt

Relatives

Unlike the Mosbach lion, regarding the classification of which as Panthera leo fossilis There has always been unanimity among scientists; there has been a long debate about the cave lion, whether it is a lion, a tiger, or even whether it should be distinguished as a separate species. In 2004, German scientists were able to unambiguously identify it using DNA analysis as a subspecies of lion. Thus, the dispute that had existed since the first description of this animal in 1810 was ended. However, the Pleistocene lions of the north formed their own group, distinct from the lions of Africa and Southeast Asia. To this so-called group Spelaea included the Mosbach lion ( P.l. fossilis), cave lion ( P.l. spelaea), East Siberian lion ( P.l. vereshchagini) and American lion ( P.l. atrox). All modern lion breeds belong to the group Leo. Both groups separated about 600 thousand years ago. Some fossil specimens of the extinct American lion were larger than the Mosbach lion and thus were the most major representatives felines that have ever existed. They were previously considered a separate species, called the giant jaguar. According to the latest research, the American lion, like the cave lion, was not a separate species, but a subspecies of lions ( Panthera leo).

see also

Notes

Literature

• A. Turner: The big cats and their fossil relatives. Columbia University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-231-10229-1
• J Burger: Molecular phylogeny of the extinct cave lion Panthera leo spelea, 2003. Molecular phylogeny of cave lion.

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See what "Cave Lion" is in other dictionaries:

CAVE LION- extinct carnivorous mammal cat family. Lived in the 2nd half. Pleistocene, early Holocene, in Europe and North. Asia. Size large lion or a tiger. He lived not in caves, but on the plains and foothills... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

CAVE LION- (Felts spelaea), extinct predatory mammal of the family. felines. Known from the Pleistocene to the beginning of modern times. era (Holocene) of Europe and North. Asia. It was larger in size than a tiger and a lion, and in its skeletal structure it had features of both of them. Lived on the plains and in... ... Biological encyclopedic dictionary

cave lion- an extinct carnivorous mammal of the cat family. He lived in the 2nd half of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene, in Europe and Northern Asia. The size of a large lion or tiger. He lived not in caves, but on the plains and foothills. * * * CAVE LION CAVE LION… … encyclopedic Dictionary

Cave lion- (Felis spelaea) is an extinct carnivorous mammal of the cat family. Lived in the second half of the Pleistocene and at the beginning of the Holocene in Europe and Northern Asia. In size it was the size of large modern lions or tigers, and in the skeletal structure, especially... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia