{"id":448591,"date":"2026-02-04T14:05:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T14:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/448591\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T14:05:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T14:05:11","slug":"this-may-be-the-oldest-known-victim-of-a-bear-attack-and-its-brutal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/448591\/","title":{"rendered":"This May Be the Oldest Known Victim of a Bear Attack\u2014and It\u2019s Brutal"},"content":{"rendered":"

New research bolsters the theory that a prehistoric adolescent was mauled by a wild animal\u2014likely a bear\u2014in what is now Italy tens of thousands of years ago.<\/p>\n

In 1942, the remains of a young adult dating back to between 27,900 and 27,300 years ago came to light in Arene Candide Cave in Liguria, Italy. The grave goods discovered alongside the skeletal remains earned the individual the nickname \u201cIl Principe,\u201d meaning \u201cThe Prince,\u201d but the person is known for more than their funerary possessions. An incomplete mandible and left clavicle suggest that The Prince had been viciously injured by a large animal. In a new study<\/a> published last year in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences, researchers add new evidence to this hypothesis.<\/p>\n

Pain, pain, and more pain \"TheThe burial at the Museo di Archeologia Ligure, Genova Pegli. \u00a9 V. S. Sparacello et al., 2026. <\/p>\n

\u201cDespite ample evidence that Paleolithic humans hunted large and dangerous carnivores, such as lions, leopards, and bears, skeletal evidence of negative interactions with wild fauna is extremely rare in the Homo sapiens paleobiological record. To date, the only individual for whom an animal attack has been hypothesized based on their pattern of traumatic lesions is the Gravettian adolescent,\u201d the team wrote in the paper. \u201cGravettian\u201d refers to a prehistoric culture that existed in Europe from around 28,000 to 19,000 years ago.<\/p>\n

According to the researchers, however, no one has sufficiently studied this theory. As such, the team reinvestigated the previously noted injuries, verifying that the individual experienced the mandibular and shoulder injuries while alive or immediately after dying. They also looked for more signs of what might have caused the person\u2019s death, finding possible fractures in the teeth, skull, and possibly even the neck. Yikes.<\/p>\n

\u201cAdditional perimortem trauma, including a linear marking on the left parietal and a puncture mark in the fibula, supports the hypothesis of animal mauling,\u201d wrote the team, including Vitale Stefano Sparacello from the University of Cagliari. \u201cGiven the overall traumatic pattern, a bear attack\u2026remains the most plausible explanation.\u201d<\/p>\n

If true, this would make The Prince fossil the oldest known example of a modern human killed by a wild animal, and possibly the earliest evidence of a fatal bear attack in human history.<\/p>\n

Nope, he didn\u2019t just fall <\/p>\n

The poor individual had also injured his left little toe and a bone in his right ankle. This strengthens the theory that injuries to the prehistoric foragers\u2019 lower limbs eventually proved to be deadly. I\u2019d imagine that foot injuries would make one\u2019s already bleak chances of surviving a bear attack even bleaker. To make matters even worse, their results indicate that The Prince outlived his injuries for a limited number of days (couldn\u2019t the beast at least have finished them off?).<\/p>\n

They noted that other potential explanations for the clearest injuries, including human-inflicted violence or a big fall, \u201care either lacking or appear less parsimonious. In fact, the [Prince] does not display other lesions that would be expected in a fall, such as forearm and leg fractures, and neither falls nor interpersonal violence would explain the marks attributed to carnivore activity and the apparent loss of bone tissue in the shoulder and mandible,\u201d they explained.<\/p>\n

At the very least, they departed for whatever afterlife they believed in with style. \u201cThe violent event and the long agony may have been reflected in the elaborate burial, following the presumed Gravettian use of formally burying exceptional individuals and exceptional events.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New research bolsters the theory that a prehistoric adolescent was mauled by a wild animal\u2014likely a bear\u2014in what…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":448592,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[18380,19122,75690,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-448591","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-archaeology","9":"tag-bears","10":"tag-prehistory","11":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448591\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/448592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}