Bear

by Wolf D. Storl

  They also obviously had a spiritual culture (i.e., experience and knowledge about things that are “invisible” to us), which is evidenced by the burial of grave goods with their dead. One grave was found decorated with wild goat horns (in today’s Uzbekistan), while the bones of the dead in another grave were colored with red ochre. In Iraqi Kurdistan, pollen analyses suggested several dead had been lain out on a bed of flowers. The plants were mainly healing ones that are even still used today in herbal healing.

  For a very long time, it was believed that Neanderthals had no language but communicated like gorillas and chimpanzees. But in 1989, a sixty-thousand-year-old Neanderthal lingual bone (also hyoid, or tongue, bone) (os hyoideum) was found in Kebara, Israel. And, in 1995, a fifty-thousand-year-old thigh bone of a young bear with four finger holes in it was found in a cave in Slovenia. Professor Jelle Atema from Boston University was able to play soft, harmonious sounds on this bear flute. Since these discoveries were made, there is not a shadow of a doubt that these people had language and music.

  The spiritual life of these early people was especially connected to bears; prehistorians speak of a veritable Neanderthal bear cult. In several places in Europe, in fact (in the Karavanks in Slovenia, in Yugoslavia, and in the Jura Mountains) researchers have found evidence of the seemingly quite strange custom of ritual bear burial. In Regourdou (Dordogne, southern France), researchers found a rectangular pit with twenty bear skulls in it and covered with a heavy stone plate. In one Neanderthal grave, a bear’s humerus was found. Evidence also suggests that some Neanderthals were wrapped in bearskins when buried (Sanders 2002, 153).

  Neanderthals making a bear altar (drawing by Martin Tiefenthaler)

  Map of Paleolithic bear cave sites in eastern Switzerland

  The most well-known Neanderthal bear ritual centers are certainly the three caves in eastern Switzerland: Wild Chapel (Wildkirchli), Wild Man’s Cave (Wildmannlisloch), and Dragon’s Den (Drachenloch), where the remains of over one thousand bears were found.1 The Wild Chapel cave, with an altitude of 4,921 feet (1,500 meters) and located under the sheer cliffs of the Saentis Peak (8,208 feet, 2,502 meters), was long a place of refuge for the hermits of the Abbey of Saint Gall (in St. Gallen, Switzerland). In the tenth century, famous monk Ekkehart is supposed to have written his heroic epos, The Waltharilied, there. In 1657, a pastor built a chapel in front of the cave’s arch. Because big bones and teeth were found again and again, medieval minds were sure that the cave must have been a dragon’s den. For that reason, the chapel was dedicated to Archangel Michael, the dragon slayer. Soon after the last hermit who lived there fell to his death in 1851 while gathering herbs, a guesthouse was built in front of the second entrance to the cave. In 1904, the curator of the natural historical museum of St. Gallen, Emil Baechler, climbed up to this guesthouse, which was built like a swallow’s nest onto the cliff. He started digging. The huge bones that he dug up were naturally not from dragons but from long extinct, huge cave bears. When he discovered a piece of flint stone, he realized that early humans had also been active there (Honoré 1997, 208).

  Bone altar in the Dragon’s Den, Glarner Alps

  A few years later, Baechler happened upon an even more significant find above the Alpine village Vaettis in the Glarner Alps: at the altitude of 8,021 feet (2,445 meters) in a steep cliff wall, he found what is now called the “Dragon’s Den,” one of the oldest human cult sites and the most significant proof of a bear cult. Next to the fire pit filled with ashes, wood and bone remains, and chips from lithic tools, Baechler discovered a “bone altar” at which was placed a bear skull with a bear’s thigh bone attached through the zygomatic arch (see illustration 13). In other dark corners of the cave, stone cases stored long leg bones of bears. One of the cases contained seven bleached bear skulls with their snouts carefully placed toward the direction of the cave opening. The analysis of the wood and bone remnants showed that the cases were around seventy thousand years old, which makes them the oldest known objects made by human hands (Lissner 1979, 200).

  Seventy thousand years! It is staggering to imagine what that means! Just 2,000 years ago, we began to record our modern history; 2,700 years ago, “eternal” Rome was founded; 4,500 years ago, the first Egyptian pyramid was built; 8,000 years ago, the first village-like settlements were built; and 12,000 years ago, the last ice age ended in Europe and North America. But the bear cult is at least seventy thousand years old and possibly even many thousands of years older than that.

  Another very interesting find in one of the caves—this one in the Wild Man’s Cave—was a carved and polished figure of a woman about four to five inches (twelve centimeters) tall and located in a niche in the wall.2 This figure, also seventy thousand years old, is the oldest known human representation in which a cave, a bear, and a woman are connected—a theme that will be seen over and over again with later Stone Age peoples, in myths and legends of many peoples, and which may even also appear in our dreams and in the depths of our own souls. Who is this mysterious woman? We will have the opportunity to get to know her better.

  Most modern prehistorians no longer see square-built, stocky Neanderthals as either physically or mentally “primitive.” They were completely human and nowadays are classified unquestionably as Homo sapiens. It is also no longer claimed that they were exterminated by a superior race. Indeed, in a 2010 breakthrough, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology was able to prove the genetic link of Neanderthals with Europeans, northern Asians, and Native Americans.3 In other words: Neanderthals are also partially our ancestors, and these ancestors of ours honored bears, communicated with them, and shared a biotope with them.

  Stone Age Hunters and Bear Shamans

  After the last ice age, human beings of the type Cro-Magnon appeared in northern climates. They were also hunters and lived in the same natural rhythms of the animals they hunted and the plants that they gathered. They roamed the steppes and tundra, following reindeer, horses, wooly rhinoceroses, aurochs, buffalo, and mammoths. Occasionally, and in the summer, they set up their camps (as a few hunting tribes even still do today) in forested areas near snowy mountains with frequent rain where there are lots of berries, fleshy roots, nuts, and fat insect larvae and where there are whole shoals of trout and periodic salmon runs in clear waterfalls. In such biotopes, which biologists describe as “bear biotopes,” nomadic bipeds met up with their cousin, the bear, at every turn. They were, so to speak, in the middle of the bear’s richly filled pantry.

  The senses of these Paleolithic hunters were likely much sharper than those of their civilized descendants—in any case, neither nerve-wracking big city noise nor the constant background sound of the entertainment industry distracted their attention. They were able to intently observe and get to know very well the grumbly, shaggy bears whose guests they were. They understood the bear’s wordless language. They would also take encounters with bears into their dreams and express them in dance and ritual. Surely, they admired the strength, cleverness, and natural dignity of the bear no less than modern hunting people do. But a bear is also dangerous, and early humans may have been shy to speak its name. Various nicknames, such as “grandfather” or “grandmother,” “the sacred animal” (as some of the forest Native Americans still call it), “honey eater,” “honey paw,” “gold foot,” “the old man with paws,” “furry old man” (a name given by Slavs and Siberians), and the like have been passed down the generations. Maybe they also just simply called it Bruin (Dutch for “brown,” from Indo-Germanic bher = brown) like the northern European tribes did. But no matter what the bear was called, it was known everywhere as a magical, sacred being.

  Bears are at home in the wide range of the tundra and forests from Scandinavia to North America and between the Tropic of Cancer and the North Pole. The polar bear lives in the center of this interhemispheric area, in the Arctic Circle. Arctic, from the Greek word arktos, actually means “bear.”4 These words go back to the Indo-Germanic root rktos = destroyer
, demon. (It is questionable whether polar bears are an independent species because polar bears and brown bears can easily mate and have offspring.)

  Black bears and sloth bears roam the southern border of this habitat, and Andean bears live in South America. All peoples from this huge expanse, the European, Asian, and North American tribes, have traditionally honored bears with elaborate ceremonies as the undisputed king of the animals and of the forest. In this regard, folklorists speak of a “circumpolar bear cult.” Not until one reaches southern latitudes does the predatory cat cult appear. In this southern area, the lion, jaguar, panther, or tiger takes the place of the king of the animals and companion of the goddess.

  Kinds of Bears

  The following kinds of big bears (Ursidae) live in the northern hemisphere.

  Cave bear (Ursus spelaeus): Unfortunately, this mighty bear that lived in Europe during the ice age and the interglacial became extinct about ten thousand years ago. Though this bear lived exclusively as a vegetarian, it exceeded all other bears in height and weight. In the “Dragon’s Cave” near Mixnitz in Austria, the bones of over thirty thousand cave bears were found—in the Middle Ages, they were believed to be dragon bones. The clay in that area, which was full of bear manure and bones, was dug up to be used as phosphate fertilizer in the nineteenth century. Sixty freight trains with fifty wagons each were filled with it. A cave near Velburg, Germany, had so many bear bones in it that it was also considered useful as fertilizer. These caves were the homes and also the graveyards of bears for thousands of years (Dehm 1976, 21). Though occasional stone shavings and wood charcoal indicate that Neanderthals also visited these caves, it does not necessarily mean that they killed bears there but that they found bones there that could be useful. If they did hunt bears, then probably only when the bears were in winter hibernation. But then the snow was so deep up in the high mountains and it was so hard to get there that it is unlikely that they made such an effort.5

  Cave bear (reconstructed according to finds in Mixnitz, Austria, 1931)

  Short-faced bear (Arctodus): The American short-faced bear, which also died out ten thousand years ago, was even bigger than the cave bear. It was not a plant eater but a meat-eating predator that could, like wolves and big cats of prey, run very fast and hunt horses, bison, and deer. It presumably died out after the ice age, along with the fauna that fed big game, and was simultaneously squeezed out by the smaller brown bear that had come from Eurasia over the Bering Strait land bridge. The considerably smaller Andean bear, or spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus), that lives in South America is a distant relative of the short-faced bear.

  Set of teeth from a brown bear

  Brown bear (Ursus arctos arctos): As its teeth indicate, the brown bear, which lives in the forests of Eurasia and North America, is an omnivore. Most of the brown bear population, about 100,000 bears, lives in Russia and Siberia; some 32,000 live in the United States, approximately 21,000 in Canada, and roughly 5,000–7,000 in small, isolated areas in Europe. In Ireland, brown bears disappeared during the Bronze Age, and in Central Europe they were almost completely decimated in the nineteenth century. The Alaskan Kodiak bear (Ursus arctos middendorfii), the biggest living brown bear; the extinct California grizzly bear (Ursus arctos californicus); the blonde Syrian brown bear (Ursus arctos syriacus); and the much-feared North American brown bear (or grizzly bear) (Ursus arctos horribilis) are each a subspecies of the brown bear, whose habitat once stretched from the North Pole to the mountains of Mexico but today is only still found in Canada and the northwestern United States. The name grizzly comes from “grizzled” meaning “with gray-speckled hair.”

  The American black bear (Ursus americanus), also called “baribal” in a Native American language (which one is not clear), is smaller than the brown bear. Black bears are excellent climbers and are very adaptable, which has made them into the biggest bear population today with an estimated population of some 500,000.

  The polar bear (Ursus maritimus) can swim a wide sea arm with considerable speed. Compared to other modern brown bears that mainly eat plants and cadavers, it is a predator and hunts. Like the Alaska Natives who share its habitat, it hunts fish, seabirds, seals, and even occasional reindeer or caribou.

  Polar bear

  World Wide Fund for Nature

  The Asiatic black bear (Ursus tibetanus) is found in China, Japan, and northern India.

  The sun bear (Ursus malayanus) is a small, obstinate bear. Found in forests from Malaysia to Burma, it is unfortunately becoming a rare sight.

  The sloth bear (Melurus ursinnus), a small fruit- and termite-eating bear, is at home in India and from Bengal to Sri Lanka.

  The panda represents its own family (Ailuropoda melanleuca) and is known worldwide as the mascot of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). It is an East Asian bear that feeds off bamboo.

  The raccoon (Procyon) is also related to bears, and is from the family Procyonidae.

  Raccoon washing a corncob

  Dogs, wolves, martens, badgers, skunks, and otters are distantly related to bears. They are all descendants of a common Miocene ancestor.

  According to the worldview of old hunting peoples, any cave was seen as a womb, the womb of the all-bearing earth goddess who watches over the unborn animal and human spirits in the depths of the Earth. No one may enter her deeply hidden realm of light without a penalty, unless that person has her blessings or is under her protection. To these peoples, it was akin to a miracle that bears could disappear into the belly of the earth and then, as soon as the days grow longer, reappear as if reborn and rejuvenated—with adorable cubs. For this reason, bears were seen in many places as messengers of the earth goddess. They were messengers of the animal/soul guardian who rules over wildlife and whose favor determines all of life, including human life. It was even believed that the Mother Earth—in German fairy tales often called Mother Goose or Mother Hulda—could even take on the form of a bear. Her spouse, the lord of the sky, could also appear as a bear. It is, thus, easy to see how the bear could be the incarnation of the highest mysteries for the circumpolar hunting peoples.

  Fearless people, such as shamans, who are summoned by spirit beings, searched for caves to establish contact with the mother or father of the animals. This was not an easy task, but it was necessary because these spirit beings had the power to send the game into the outer world to let it multiply or keep it inside thus causing the people to starve. Similar to approaching a bear itself, one had to approach the goddess with extreme care and know her likes and dislikes. By going into a cave, singing sacred songs there, fasting, drumming, or being completely still, the shaman became like a bear himself. He identified with the mighty animal. Then the goddess, her horned companion, the “lord of the forest,” or the bear spirit could appear to the shaman, teach him, and initiate him into the great secrets of nature.

  An animal that can go in and out of the womb of the great goddess without incident, like a man’s member in a woman’s vulva, is surely also a guardian of fertility and birth—an opener of life’s door. Consequently, the woman bear shaman was always a midwife. Even as recently as in ancient Greece, the bear goddess Artemis was the patron of women in labor. In some Slavic languages, a new mother is even called “bear.” And for the Cheyenne, nako, meaning “bear,” is the formal name for mother. Such expressions as “to bear a child” come from the Indo-Germanic root word bher (“to carry, to bring,” and also “brown”); in German, related words are ge-baer-en = to bear and Ge-baer-mutter = uterus, with the German word for bear (Baer) within each word.

  Bear caves in the Pyrenees or in the Alps, which were difficult to reach and to which shamans retreated to find inner visions or youths were brought for initiation into tribal secrets, were cult places and not for living in (not meaning to offend Carlo’s ideas). They were cult centers of reindeer and mammoth hunters of the early Paleolithic. These nomads left humanity’s very first genuine works of art deep inside of caves; they lived in wigwams similar to those of the
Native Americans of the prairie, hunted with spears, fished with fishing hooks, and wore carefully sewn leather clothes. All animals that could be hunted, all species that the earth mother bore from her womb, were drawn on the cave walls—including the bear. In Trois-Frères Cave, for example, a wounded bear can be seen with blood streaming from the mouth. In the same room, there is a dancing shaman with a long beard, buck’s antlers, wolf ears, and a horse’s tail. His hands are bear paws. He is probably the lord of the animals, the companion of the goddess.

  The Lady of the Caves, the bearer of the animals and the companion of the bear, is also found again and again in early Paleolithic art. One finds small statues of a woman carved from ivory, bones, or soapstone that are jestingly called “Venus figures” by prehistorians. They are not like modern fashion models, but are fat with big breasts, fleshy backsides, and big bellies. Their exaggerated genitals make us think of motherhood, pregnancy, and fertility.

  Left: The magician of Trois-Frères (Ariège, France, early Paleolithic) Right: One of the many “Venus figures,” the goddess of the cave, birth, and bears (small statue from Montpazier, Dordogne, France)

  Chapter 3

  Bear Ancestors

  Women, protect your womb from the bear!

  Siberian proverb