Extinction because the sinuses are too big to eat meat? The "recipe" of cave bear, a prehistoric beast, is still a mystery.
The skull of the cave bear discovered by the researchers is much larger than that of the existing brown bear. Image source: Science Progress website
Most people may have heard of the extinction of mammoth mammoth, hairy rhinoceros, bighorn deer and other giant fauna in Eurasia during the thrilling extinction event of the Ice Age, but they are not necessarily familiar with cave bears with a body width of 1.7 meters, a body length of 3.5 meters and a weight of more than one ton.
Ursus spelaeus is a kind of bear that lived in the northern part of Eurasia in Pleistocene. It became extinct about 20,000 years ago. Because its fossils were mostly found in caves, it was named "Cave Bear". In many famous caves, almost all the bones of the cave bear have been found. It was also found in Zhoukoudian, Beijing, China, and it was the two giant bears in the Pleistocene with the giant short-faced bear.
Whether the cave bear is a vegetarian or a carnivore, and what is the relationship between the "recipe" of this behemoth and its extinction, the scientific community has always had different opinions. In recent 40 years, through the research on the level of nitrogen -15 in the bones of cave bears, some scientists think that they are herbivores because they like tender grass, grass roots and strawberries. Some scientists believe that they also hunted some animals, even humans at that time, which should be carnivores. Recently, a famous international journal, Scientific Progress, published a paper saying that scientists gave a biomechanical explanation to the eating habits of cave bears through computer simulation, and put forward a brand-new view that "chewing leads to the functional degradation of sinus and other systems, and then the skull becomes smaller, which may lead to the extinction of cave bears" through the relationship between chewing exercise and skull development.
Viewpoint 1: Plants wither and starve to death due to falling temperature.
Three years ago, Yukichi Naito of the University of Tubingen, Germany, found that the content of nitrogen -15 in the bones of cave bears was low, with strong jaws and large flat teeth, and only dense vegetation grew around their residence. All this shows that cave bears are herbivores. This special diet is the reason why the cave bear became extinct more than 20,000 years ago.
At that time, the temperature dropped sharply, and the vegetation withered in a large area, which made the cave bear lose its food. Scholars believe that because the food of the cave bear is very single, it must eat a lot in order to meet the needs of the body. Compared with pandas who have to eat 40 kilograms of bamboo every day, cave bears eat more than that, and the nutrient conversion rate is very low. On the contrary, the brown bear is an omnivore with high nitrogen content in its bones. Its diet includes fruits, honey, fish and so on. Its rich diet structure makes it more adaptable to the environment, so it can be widely distributed. This view has also been widely recognized.
The second point of view is that the fight between caves and humans has been wiped out.
In the Carpathian Mountains in central Europe, the bones of cave bears discovered by scientists show that cave bears are not as gentle as people thought before. They have huge teeth and razor-sharp claws, are fierce carnivores and even eat people. By analyzing the data of cave bear bones found in the southwest corner of this mountain range in recent years, scientists show that most cave bears have a lot of nitrogen -15 content, which exceeds that of many herbivores. This shows that these cave bears are carnivorous individuals and are typical carnivores. They not only compete with humans for caves, but also prey on hyenas, gray wolves, cave lions and fish.
In December 2019, Science Report magazine published an evolutionary research report by European scientists, saying that the cave bear population began to decrease sharply about 40,000 years ago, which was earlier than the climate cooling period and coincided with the spread of modern humans in Europe. The cold climate and the subsequent reduction of plant-derived food may lead to the dispersion of cave bear population into different sub-populations, which live in small habitats with mild climate and rich plants. Various human behaviors, including hunting, may have interrupted the connection between these sub-populations, thus playing a decisive role in the extinction of cave bears.
This view has already appeared in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences in 2008, and an international research group composed of scientists from the United States, Britain and Germany published their findings — — The cave bear is one of the strongest rivals of human ancestors. With wisdom, human ancestors destroyed the living environment of these fierce animals, drove them out of their caves and rushed to the mountains. There is evidence that some caves were occupied by ancient humans and cave bears alternately. From this, it is speculated that humans killed or drove away those depressed bears during the hibernation of cave bears; When spring comes, the cave bears who are awake from hibernation and hungry in their bellies will attack humans and recapture the caves. In this cycle of fighting, humans with slightly stronger intelligence finally seized the caves and wiped them out.
The latest view is that chewing ability becomes weak, so you can’t eat meat and "sleep for a long time"
French and Belgian researchers found that the cave bear is an omnivore by analyzing its teeth. Compared with herbivores, carnivores will accumulate more nitrogen in the body during eating. In addition, black bears and brown bears are omnivores, which shows that although cave bears may mainly eat grass in most cases, sometimes they will taste the meat.
Axel Barlow of Potsdam University in Germany and others have analyzed the genome sequences of four cave bears that lived between 71,000 and 34,000 years ago, compared them with those of other animals, and analyzed the scratches and spots on their tooth glazes to judge their food composition. The researchers introduced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they found that cave bears were not vegetarian. Before entering hibernation, cave bears had a variety of foods, including poultry and mammals, invertebrates, seeds and various dried fruits and fresh fruits. Like most omnivores, it will not go into hibernation until it stores enough energy.
According to the latest viewpoint published in Scientific Progress, the extinction of the cave bear is not due to the competition with human beings, but because the cave bear’s nose has evolved a special structure. The research team from the University of Malaga, Spain, analyzed the eating scene of cave bears by computer simulation to determine whether cave bears can effectively adjust their diet under the condition of limited vegetation resources, thus explaining why European cave bears became extinct during the climate change period.
The research team scanned the skulls of four cave bears and eight living brown bears, and found that the sinus of cave bears was surprisingly large, and the sinus directly affected the chewing mode, strength and amplitude. Due to the enlargement of the sinus, the skull and cranium of the cave bear face are deformed, and the originally round top of the head becomes flat and extends backward continuously, so the bite force of the canine teeth and incisors becomes weak. As time goes by, they can’t tear the meat with their front teeth and canine teeth, but only rely on molars to grind the plants and swallow them. Therefore, when grass is not enough to eat, they can’t turn to meat.
Why did cave bears evolve into large sinuses? In the cold ice age, cave bears hibernate longer than other Xiong Ke animals in a year, and the large sinuses help to reduce the consumption during hibernation. Sinus is a cavity in the skull, with four pairs, which are symmetrical left and right. It can adjust the temperature and humidity of the air inhaled into nasal cavity, which is very important for cave bears to hibernate.
Alejandro perez Ramos, a paleontologist at the University of Malaga in Spain, one of the authors of the paper, explained that cave bears evolved large sinuses to adapt to the environment. With large sinuses, they can reduce energy consumption by hibernating in winter, so as to survive the winter when food supply is insufficient. But it is also because of the large sinuses that their chewing ability is affected. They can only eat grass and can’t eat meat at all. When the vegetation can’t grow because of the cold, the cave bear can’t survive by changing its diet, especially before hibernation, because it fails to intake enough energy, it is likely to run out of fat and "stay awake for a long time", which eventually leads to the extinction of the whole species.
Of course, more research evidence is needed about the sinus structure of cave bear. It is believed that with more and more scientific discoveries mastered by scientists, whether cave bears are vegetarians or omnivores and the mystery of cave bears’ extinction will eventually be revealed to the world.