Neolithic teen “prince” was mauled by a bear

A new study of the remains of a 15-year-old boy buried with luxurious grave goods in the Arena Candide Cave in Liguria, northwestern Italy, 27,000 years ago has found evidence that he was mauled to death by a bear. This is some of the first physical evidence of a violent interaction between prehistoric humans and megafauna, and the only one that is an articulated skeleton in a grave rather than a small bone fragment.

The grave was first discovered in 1942. The body of an adolescent male was placed supine on a bed of red ochre with a lump of yellow ochre below the jaw. The most ornate artifact found in the grave was the boy’s headdress made of hundreds of perforated shells and several deer canines. His grave also contained ivory pendants, four antler bâtons percés (spear-throwers) and a large flint blade held in his right hand. He was dubbed “Il Principe” (the Prince) because of this remarkable funerary assemblage. It is one of the most richly adorned graves of the Gravettian culture ever found in Italy.

Severe trauma to the skeleton was immediately evident to the archaeologists who unearthed it. The left scapula, left humerus, the left clavicle and left mandible had missing or damaged parts. The damage was so severe there was a hole between the neck, left shoulder and mandible. The yellow ochre lump placed there was likely connected to the wound, either to cover the disfiguring injury or as a ritual healing or restoration of wholeness.

From the start, the prevailing hypothesis was that the youth had been attacked by a wild animal during a hunt gone wrong. No comprehensive studies of the bones and injuries has been done, however, and when the skeleton was reassembled for display at the Ligurian Archaeological Museum after World War II, it was patched with resins and glues that obscured some of the fractures.

A team of researchers obtained authorization from the museum to remove the bones for thorough analysis with modern technology. In addition to the known fractured and missing bones, the team found perimortem bite marks and a linear mark on the skull consistent with a claw swipe, that could not be explained by other potentially fatal scenarios (a fall from a great height, violence inflicted by another human). Given the large carnivores that were found in the region during the Late Pleistocene, the likeliest candidates for the perpetrator are a brown bear or a cave bear.

The researchers concluded that lesions on the boy’s skull and ankle were bite and claw marks, likely from a cave or brown bear, based on their patterns. “He was probably a budding hunter still learning his skills when this happened,” says lead study author Vitale Stefano Sparacello, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cagliari in Italy.

The animal dislodged the boy’s mandible, left a groove in his skull, broke his clavicle and left a bite mark on his right ankle. Even the boy’s left pinky toe had been fractured. Though we don’t know for sure, Sparacello contends that the injuries are indicative of a bear who would have viewed the boy as more of a menace that needed to be neutralized than a meal because these bears mostly ate plants.

Microscopic examination found evidence of a small amount of bone healing. This means the poor youth lived for a few days, no more than three, after he was absolutely savaged by the animal. That means despite having face and shoulder torn up and his foot bitten, the prince’s major blood vessels remained intact or he would have bled to death right away. He must have been saved by his companions and brought to safety.

The study had been published in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences and can be read here (pdf).

* This article was originally published here