Cave lions might have been hunted to extinction by humans, according to researchers who say they have found evidence that the creatures were skinned for their pelts 16,000 years ago.
Larger than an African lion, but thought to lack a mane, cave lions were hunted by Neanderthals, with some evidence that Homo sapiens occasionally also killed the animals, alongside other more commonly-hunted carnivores.
But now a team of researchers from Spain say they have found evidence that humans were skinning the creatures around 16,000 years ago. That, they say, suggests that the creatures could have played an important role among human groups - and that humans might have had a hand in the extinction of the cave lion.
“Because humans are showing in this archaeological site that they had quite an expertise in skinning lions, we speculate about the possibility that the extinction of the cave lion, in addition to climatic conditions, in addition to other factors, you have to take into account that humans could be an important factor,” said Edgard Camarós, co-author of the study from the Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social in Tarragona.
Writing in the journal Plos One, the team reveal that they found the fossil remains of nine bones from cave lion claws. These were located within the area where three huts once stood in the lower gallery of La Garma, a cave in northern Spain whose entrance was blocked in the late pleistocene.
“Everything inside the cave remains as the humans during prehistory left it there, it is like a closed box,” said Camarós. “I usually say it is the best way of travelling to the past, it is the perfect time machine.”
While one fossilized bone was found attached to the cave floor, the other eight were not, allowing them to be cast in silicone and studied without removing the fossils from the cave.
The researchers say it is likely that all came from one lion, and were part of a pelt created when it was skinned. “We cannot destroy these fossils to do DNA [analysis] but that would be the only way to see if it is the only individual,” said Camarós. “But we are quite sure that it is the only individual because all of the phalanxes, the claws, they have the same size, they were located in the same context.”
Cut marks on the bones, he adds, back up the idea that they were part of a pelt. “It is only the skin because we have only found the claws of the lion,” said Camarós. “The cut marks are placed just over the place where the tendons and ligaments are attached to the bone,” he added. “They were actually cutting those elements attaching these claws to the carcass. But they didn’t cut the part that attached those bones to the skin.”
Camarós says that the evidence shows that the human who skinned the cave lion clearly knew what they were doing, suggesting that the discovery could point to humans playing a role in the extinction of the species. What’s more the marks are similar to those made by modern hunters when skinning animals.
The team believe that the location of the bones deep within the cave, a location away from the living area and where there is evidence of artwork and other ritual activity, suggests the cave lion pelt might have been used in a ritual, andpotentially covered one of the huts like a roof.
Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum, said that while the research suggests the cave lion was skinned, he believes there is not enough evidence to draw further conclusions.
“That the evidence suggests experience on the part of the skinner could also be correct, but we can hardly hang the claim of this being a regular event on this point alone,” he said.
“The extrapolation of this result to a wider phenomenon of cave lion exploitation for ritual and as evidence for a human agent cause for cave lion extinction seems unsupported by the evidence,” he added. “This may have been a one-off. For now, we simply don’t know.”
