March 14, 2024 • 49 mins
We are creatures of the epigean world: the world of light on Earth’s surface. But there is another world – a world beneath the surface. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe venture into the world of cave biology or biospeleology. (part 4 of 4)
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with the
fourth and final part of our series on cave biology
and cave environments. If you haven't listened to the other
parts already, this will probably be a richer experience if
you go back and check those out first. In the
previous parts, we talked about some of the common characteristics
of cave environments, especially as they pertain to the life
(00:37):
forms that might inhabit caves. We talked about the different
types of organisms you find in caves, the ones that
are fully cave adapted versus the ones that are only visitors.
We talked about cave adapted organisms such as the blind
Mexican cavefish also known as the Mexican tetra, the om
which is a type of cave salamander found the dynark alps.
(01:02):
We talked about bat guano. We talked about snakes that
hiding in caves and attack bats as they come and go.
We got into a lot of great stuff, and today
we're here to round out the series.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, with a lot of Like a lot of our
multi part episodes, it's kind of like the first episode
is kind of like a lot of the initial information
you need, and then the second episode this is where
you find some of the core stuff that attracted us
to the topic to begin with Part three we kind
of like fill in with a little more data some
other interesting entries in said series in the fourth episode
(01:35):
or whatever the final episode happens to be. Generally, that's
where it's like, what's left, what's the thing that came
up in our research that we didn't know we were
going to be excited about or or or in some cases,
maybe what's the weird tangential connection that also came up
or we found ourselves drifting into the in our journey. Oh,
I think that's a good way to characterize it. So
(01:57):
what have you got, Rob Well? I I mentioned this earlier.
I forget which of the earlier episodes, but I mentioned
the extinct cave bear in Passing, and I would just
kind of I kept touching back in on the subject
as we were working on the other episodes, and finally
I was like, Yeah, we need to go in a
little deeper and talk about what is ultimately like a
really fascinating organism. There have been disagreements and mysteries regarding it,
(02:22):
and it is an organism that, while no longer with us,
does overlap with our ancestors. You know, it was an
ice age creature. I included here for you, Joe, a
reconstruction and image of what one of these bears would
have looked like potentially, And in a bit I'll get
into like what are some of the main anatomical features.
(02:43):
But just looking at you can tell this is a
very huge bear. It doesn't look that different from say,
like a large, you know, grizzly bear, brown bear of
some sort. Coloration is brownish, but one might notice that
the head is enormous, has a much bigger head than
one might expect, certainly on an extant bear.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Yeah, it looks a lot like a grizzly. Though I'm
no bear expert, it does appear to me in this
reconstruction to have a somewhat shorter snout and the sort
of boxier.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Head boxier and I'm to understand would have been would
have would have appeared wider as well. So we're talking
about Ursus Spilaeus. It's a member of the Ursus genus
alongside the brown bear, which includes the grizzly subspecies, among others,
the polar bear, the American black bear, and the Asian
(03:38):
black bear. That means it's naturally a member of the
larger Ursudae family, which also includes the likes of giant pandas,
short face bears, and others.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Oh I didn't realize pandas were technically in that family.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah, yeah, Like one of the interesting things about pandas
is that pandas are herbivores for the moment part, but
they still have a carnivores digestive system, and they still
have like carnivore jeanes, So they're pretty fascinating in their
own right. You know, it's easy to overlook how interesting
pandas are, especially if you go to a zoo and
(04:14):
you see one in captivity that is probably not doing
much other than sleeping or eating bamboo.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
The last time I went to a zoo, the thing
I saw that filled me with the most joy was
actually vicarious joy through a panda. When I saw the
feeders through some new bamboo into the enclosure, and the
panda went up to the pile of bamboo and literally
just flopped in it. Just flopped down in its food like, ah,
give it to me.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
It is literally their favorite thing, Yeah, rolling around in it.
More on this connection to the panda in in a
minute here, but yeah, the cave bear when extinct. I
do want to highlight that the exact timing for this
depends on exactly what sources and what evidence you're looking at.
I've seen between twenty eight twenty seven thousand years ago
(05:00):
during the last glacial maximum. I've seen twenty four thousand
years ago, and in some sources. Some of the older sources,
you also see fifteen thousand years ago cited as an
extinction point, but I believe an earlier point in twenty eight,
twenty seven, maybe twenty four is generally favored by scientists today.
That's generally the range, the broader range in which I'm
(05:21):
tending to see the numbers and the sources I was
looking at. And the interesting thing about the cave bear, too,
is that this animal is a recent enough denizen of
the planet that we have been able to study its
soft tissue, in addition to its bones and its actual
you know, we were able to study like the chemical
composition of its bones. There was even a frozen specimen
discovered in twenty twenty, I believe, and we've been able
(05:42):
to sequence its genome, so we were able to learn
a fair amount about what they were and what they did,
though certain mysteries remain about, you know, their exact lifestyles,
their interactions with other organisms and so forth. Well, let's
come back to the cave theme, right, because that's the
umbrella on which we're just under which we're discussing the
(06:03):
cave bear. Here. We're of course, not talking about an
obligate cave dweller. This is not a blind, hairless bear
living in the depths, as I'm suddenly realizing. As interesting
as that might be, I'm assuming some fantasy weaver has
done something like that before. But now this would have
had at best been a troglophilic creature.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Okay, so the troglophilic creature enjoys visiting caves. It may
visit caves for a number of reasons, but it doesn't
live there permanently, and it's not biologically adapted to full
time life in the caves.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah, Like it's not just hanging out in there all
the time, eating bats or anything. But you know, the
cave moniker can be confusing with a lot of these species,
because of course we speak of cave men either in
terms of prehistoric Homo sapiens or Neanderthals, though even with
the latter, who certainly did utilize cave environments as did humans,
they used open air sites for various activities as well,
(06:59):
it seems, so it's not like they just lived in
caves or or and they're certainly not creatures that were
obligate cave dwellers. Plus, the cave moniker sometimes has as
much to do, if not more, to do with the
places where we've discovered the remains, because, as we've touched
on before, I think in this series and probably in general,
like caves are a great place for remains to be preserved.
(07:23):
To some degree. I saw a paper that was quoting
an expert on cave bears. It was like the bears
slept in caves and they had the good fortune to
die in them, something to that effect. You know, they're like,
fortunately for us, they died in caves a lot, and
so we have a lot of remains to look at.
But anyway, just because we have come to refer to
(07:43):
a creature as a cave animal, it doesn't necessarily mean
that it lived in caves. The main example of this
era would be the cave lion or Panthera spileea, also
known as the step lion, which is now understood to
have largely lived in open areas, possibly woodlands. But we
know them a lot of We know a lot about
(08:04):
them from skeletal remains found in caves, thus cave lions.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
But it's not thought that that's where they spent a
huge amount of their time. It's more just like we
happened to have gotten some remains from caves.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
That's right, yeah, I mean their remains found in caves
are apparently best understood as on one hand, perhaps the
accumulations or middens of extinct cave hyenas. These this was
all This is also known as the ice age spotted
hyena that would have scavenged carcasses and brought them back
to the caves where they lived, or at least the
(08:39):
cave openings where they live. These would have been. This
is an example of something that did live in caves
based on our current understanding, and so they would have hoarded, scavenged,
and killed prey in such places while also competing apparently
with Neanderthals for some of the same cave environments.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
But back to the cave lion. It is also thought
that they might have ventured into caves during the winter,
especially in search of hibernating bears that might in some
cases be easier to pick off, especially if they were
desperate for the food. And they also may have periodically
entered caves in order to steal food away from cave hyenas,
though to be sure, it seems like they largely preyed
(09:18):
on larger wild herbivores like the wild horse and the bison.
Either way, cave lions wound up in caves, and cave
environments helped preserve their bones for future excavation by humans, who,
at least at first were like, oh, this is a
cave line. We found it in a cave.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
But I assume you're saying that researchers do not believe
the same kind of naming error was made with cave bears.
The cave bears really do seem largely involved with caves.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yes, yes, that's the consensus. So you know, what were
cave bears. We talked a little bit about what they
look like already. They were very large bears comparable to
or even larger than any of the bears we know today,
even the polar bears and Kodiak bears, which depending on
who you're talking to, these are kind of like the
(10:05):
two extant species of bears that are often held up
as the biggest. So male cave bears could range and weight.
One estimate I saw was three fifty to six hundred
kilograms or seven hundred and seventy to three hundred and
twenty pounds. I've also seen like the four hundred to
one thousand kilogram estimate, about eight hundred and eighty to
(10:28):
twenty two hundred pounds. Again, it's going to vary. The
males were bigger than the females and so forth. But
anyway you cut it, big bears, big heavy bears. Their
weight were have fluctuated depending on you know, where they
were seasonally, where their diet was, what the overall climate
happened to be. But yes, these were very large bears.
(10:49):
And therefore, as you can imagine, not just any cave
is going to do. Cave has to be large enough
to hold a bear. Now, speaking of these caves, I
was reading about them a little bit. I was looking
a few different sources. But I've had this book on
my shelf for years and I hadn't really cracked it open.
(11:11):
But it's by one wolf Dee Storal titled Bear Myth,
Animal and Icon. This author, by the way, I think
he's generally more considered an anthropologist and an ethnobotanist, and
I'm to understand his views have ventured into some areas
that may be considered more esoteric and even controversial, but
I don't think any of that applies to this work. Okay, Anyway,
(11:34):
the author here points to another connection who is kind
of similar to something we discussed I believe in the
last episode with the Ohm, a connection between an actual
cave organism and traditions concerning the dragon. There's a cave
in Austria known as Drachenhole or Dragon's Hole, so named
(11:57):
because the copious amounts of cave bear bones in there
were apparently it interpreted during the Middle Ages as the
bones of dragons. The cave is located near a place
called mix Nits and is associated with the legend of
the dragon Slayer of mixed Nits. I was looking around,
I couldn't find what felt like a definitive analysis or
(12:18):
retelling of this legend. But I saw some ride ups
where it seems like it's, you know, you, on one level,
your typical tale of a dragon slayer. But it did
seem based on the one telling I found that the
dragon slayer here uses an ingenious trap rather than overt
combat to kill the dragon. Like it has to do
with like a sharpened spikes and left out to gouge
(12:41):
into the dragon's flesh and then it goes off and dies.
That sort of thing, you know, kind of your predator
model of overcoming your foe.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Oh that's my kind of tale. I always love a
monster trap.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Yeah, so you're probably wondering, Okay, this cave is full
of cave bare bones. How many bones were talking about?
You know, we're talking about like two or three individuals,
maybe a dozen individuals, you know, maybe a dusty old
set of cave bones near one corner, a skull in
the other. No, no, no, we're talking about the bones
of an estimated thirty thousand cave bears. Thirty thousand.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Yeah. Other bones were apparently also found in this particular cave,
including those those of the cave line apparently, but we're
mostly talking about cave bears here and in quite an abundance.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
You have to think how long they would have been
accumulating there for. That's unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah, yeah, like we would be dealing with a situation
here where the bears lived in these caves, hibernated in
these caves, and died in these caves for thousands and
thousands of years. So like, recent genetic data apparently indicates
that cave beer populations in Europe, specifically along the Danube
River were stable for a good one hundred thousand years
or more. So, yeah, you're dealing with lots of bears
(13:56):
living and dying in these locations.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
That is incredible.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Now, the caves, specifically this Austrian cave, the system was
apparently excavated during the nineteenth century because the soil found
inside of these caves is rich, was rich in bones
and bear manure that it accumulated over these vast periods
of time, and they proved usable as phosphate fertilizer, and
(14:21):
there was a shortage during this time period. Storal rites
that sixty trains with fifty cars each were filled with
the stuff and also points out that a cave near Velberg, Germany,
was also excavated for its cave bear riches during this
time period. Now, these aren't the only two European caves
that there's evidence of a lot of cave bear activity.
(14:43):
I read in passing examples of caves and for instance
Spain and Romania that also provided a great deal of
cave bear remains. Now speaking to their death in these caves,
because you know, it's one thing to sleep in the cave,
and there is evidence we'll get to that in a second.
There is evidence already of like the bears having lived
(15:04):
in and slept in the caves, but they also died there.
And I've read that it's thought that cave bears may
have frequently died during hibernation, especially during particularly trying time periods,
which we'll get to here, because if an individual couldn't
put on enough weight heading into winter and or environmental
conditions were particularly dire, they just might not emerge again
(15:27):
in the spring. Plus we already mentioned that in some
cases you might have predators venturing into those caves to
try and find an easy bear to pick off. And
it's any easy mathematics to imagine, like, okay, if you
have a weakened bear in a hibernation state, one that
might not be surviving the winter anyway, Like that's ideal
(15:49):
biomass to pick off. Now. I think everyone's familiar enough
with the fat bear week craze these days to know, yeah,
that bears have to pack it on, and we find
some sport and amusement in figuring out, like which bears
are packing on the most and what do extant bears
(16:11):
eat in order to go into hibernation, While the answer
is what do you got? They're omnivores, anything is on
the table, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
I think a lot of the ones that we're familiar
with are these ones photographed in Alaska. From what I understand,
they're probably going to be eating a lot of like
river fish, like salmon.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah. Yeah. The cave bears, though, this would have been
a different matter. So research has differed at different times
on whether the bears were strictly herbivores or if they
were mostly herbivores. At the very least, they seem to
have depended far more on the consumption of plant matter
than pretty much any extent bear, with the obvious exception
(16:51):
of the giant panda. These cave bears would have gone
out and eaten a lot of vegetation, and we see
that reflected in like they're just their anatomy. So I
was looking at the work of Alejandro Perez Ramos at
the University of Malaga in Spain. This would have been
a twenty twenty study. The researcher here points out that
(17:11):
the cave bears were built in such a way. Their
skulls were built in such a way that they could
only chew with their back teeth. So extent bears, the
bears we have today can chew with the front as
well as the back, and therefore have the correct dental
build to eat vegetation or meat, switching back and forth
(17:33):
between the two depending on what's available. You know. So
if there are a lot of fish on hand, bam,
the bear bears like grizzlies and so forth, they're good
to go, get in there and eat that meat. Dead whale. Likewise,
get in there scaving some of that meat. Oh what's this?
You only have berries? Or oh somebody left the door
open to their house. You know, they can make do
(17:55):
with what's available, but again not the case with bears.
A chemical analysis of cave bear bones has also revealed
a mostly plant based diet. So the cave bear had
evolved to a point at which there was no going
back in a swift manner anyway, such as the demands
brought on by sudden changes in climate, and this would
(18:16):
seem to be a major factor in their extinction, if
not the major factor in their extinction. And this seems
to be the answer that most of the current research
is pointing to. But it also reveals some other interesting
things about them, you know, the build of their skull here,
because they also had much larger sinuses in exchange for
that lack of robust front teeth. And this is interesting
(18:40):
especially because extant bears are already famous super smellers. I
think if you've ever ventured into bear territory, you have
been warned. You know, don't leave, say, chapstick in your car,
because a bear can smell that, and a bear will
want to come see what kind of sweet, delicious fruity
food you have hidden away inside of your automobile. Oh.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
I just imagining the bears going wild over like the
synthetic kinds of fruity flavors that you get in all
these products, Like what is funberry? I must discover exactly?
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Yeah, I mean it's This is again with something we've
touched on already in this series. You know, like how
how difficult or impossible it is for human beings to
really put themselves in the sense world of another organism
that has, you know, a sense array different from our own.
And smell is another one of those areas. So take,
(19:36):
for instance, a bloodhound, a canine. Canines in general, but
specifically something like a bloodhound is already pretty famous for
being a super smeller. That is, they're just dogs in general.
They're like their sense of smell is just a different
part of their being, you know. You see that when
you see a dog like riding around with its human
(19:57):
in a vehicle and it has its head out the window, right,
it's like it's like unlike all the psychedelics at that moment.
And yet I've seen it estimated that a bear, and
again not a cave bear, just bears in general, bears
we have today, I've read that their sense of smell
is seven times better than a bloodhound, and that would
mean that their sense of smell is thousands of times
(20:20):
more powerful than a human beings. And yet the cave
bear likely had an even keener sense of smell. If
we can even imagine such a thing, likely great hearing
as well, but on the other hand, reduced eye sight
and a smaller brain that you might than you might
expect with such a large head. And I'm suspecting here
that you know that would also have to do with
(20:41):
its mode of life at this point in its evolution,
Like it it's just going around eating as much vegetation
as it can, sifting through these various sources of vegetation,
but maybe not having to be as clever and opportunistic
as a true omnivore would be. But anyway, all this
would seem to be wound up in their extinction as well,
(21:03):
because somewhere around twenty four thousand years ago, around the
time when their age ended, the age of the cave
bear comes to an end, temperatures plummeted. This would have
been the last glacial maximum period. Cooler tempts meant less
time and less plant matter to bulk up on before
going into hibernation, so the cave bears likely couldn't keep up.
(21:26):
They couldn't bulk up, and again could not adjust their
diet like other bear species. So the bear species that
survived these cold times were the ones that could diversify
that could go in more on the meat perhaps than
they had been and in many cases, yeah, this would
mean that you would have cave bears crawling into their
caves to hibernate with or without young and simply never
(21:49):
getting back up again. I alluded to this earlier, but yeah,
in the caves that they called home, we do have
more than just their bones to speak of them. So they,
like a lot of animals, they ended up leaving claw
marks on the walls in some cases, and they also
dug shallow depressions in the floor, likely as places to sleep,
and you can find images of these from various European
(22:12):
cave systems. You know, they're not especially flashy, but it's
this sort of large bear shaped indention in the ground
and many of these remained to this day, and some
of those claw marks, by the way, would later be
incorporated into the cave art of Homo sapiens.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Oh interesting, Like you mean like that humans made their
art around pre existing claw marks in the walls and
like made that part of the art.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Yeah. Yeah, Like I believe that's the case with some
of the art in France's Chauvet caves, where you have
depictions of cave bears, but also evidence of cave bears,
including claw marks. Now, speaking of humans, there, of course,
there's long been some mystery over exactly what sort of
relationships the Anderthals and Homo sapiens had with the cave bears.
(23:00):
I mean, we're humans. We can't help it. We find
out that we were alive at all during the same
time period, We're like, what about us? How do we
factor into this this fascinating and majestic scenario. What were
we doing? And did we ride them? Did we ride them?
Did we worship them? Yeah, there was this much popularized
idea that early humans worshiped cave bears, and it does
(23:22):
seem like there's some potential evidence for this, but apparently
this has long been disputed and sort of largely pushed
out of the way. This would have been the basis
for fictional works like the novel Clan of the Cave Bear,
but there's still various mysteries along these lines. You know,
they will never know one hundred percent what our ancient
ancient ancestors really thought about these creatures. And it's also
(23:46):
easy to simplify what we thought about them that like, oh,
did we worship them? Or did we eat them or
did we run from them? And of course, you know,
even our prehistoric ancestors I think would have had the
mental complexity to do all three, depending on where you
are in a given day and so forth.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
I seem to I think it's been years now, but
I have a memory of coming across some interesting claims
on the Internet about about, like, you know, prehistoric humans
and their specific beliefs regarding bears, and I was like,
what's the source of this, Like what's the evidence for it?
And I could never actually track it down, Like it
seems like there's just a lot of claims floating around
(24:27):
on the internet about prehistoric humans and bears.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Yeah, I mean, I guess on one level, it's like
we do acknowledge the fact that human, ancient humans and
prehistoric humans, they acknowledged these large creatures in their natural world. Yea,
they had relationships with various creatures in their natural world,
and they seem to have superstitious and or mythological ideas
(24:52):
about them. We talked about some of the earliest images
and past episodes of the show where these people would
combine human and animal imagery into a single entity. Though
exactly what is meant by that, We're not sure.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Yeah, this actually came up in a listener mail I
did while you were out recently, a listener wrote in
about our episode on the Loewenmine this, you know, this
carving that has been interpreted as depicting a sort of
a human body with the lion's head. Though there's some
dispute about whether that's the correct interpretation of what it's
supposed to be, but that seems like a common interpretation
(25:27):
and so yeah, this raised these interesting questions about like,
when did we start forming ideas about creatures that did
not exist in nature.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, it is hard for us to figure out the
exact artistic intent. For example, going back to the Chouve
Cave in France, this is a cave that contains human
illustrations of cave bears among other animals, copious amounts of
cave bear bones, cave bear claw marks on the walls.
It has floor depressions made by the bears. But one
(25:57):
chamber here also apparently has a single cave bear skull
that seemed to have been placed on a stone slab
in the center of the chamber. But it's impossible to
say why this is the case. Were they worshiping the
bear or a particular bear. Was it just a curiosity,
was it some form of superstition or what? Did it
(26:19):
represent some tangible connection between these people and their way
of life to the bear, or was it something more abstract. Now,
apparently we do know from some skeletal evidence this would
be in rare cases, some evidence of butchery. And also
there may have been another example that was more directly
(26:39):
tied to some sort of like hunting weapon, but at
least butchery evidence that shows that humans at least sometimes
hunted or killed, or at least butchered cave bears, but
is pointed out in Andrew Curry's twenty ten Fate of
the Cave Bear article ver smithsonian dot com, citing anthropologist
Eric Trinkhaus, it's unlikely that human hunting impacted the cave
(27:03):
bear's existence or led to its extinction. Trenkyles points out
faced many lethal threats during this time, and the cave bear,
if provoked, was certainly one of them. I mean, just
because it doesn't really eat meat doesn't mean that an
animal this big and this ferocious could not kill you.
(27:23):
So it's unlikely, according to this expert, that humans tangled
with it all that much. But they might have sometimes
gone after hibernating bears or hunted them in other isolated
events for one reason or another. So it happened, but
probably not all that often. Still there's a Again, there's
(27:44):
a lot of room for some level of supernatural consideration
of the cave bear. Going back to the work of
a Wolf Storel in his book, he writes that surely quote,
any animal that can go in and out of the
womb of the Great Goddess without incident is surely all
a guardian of fertility and birth. Again, he's predominantly an
anthropologist and athnobotanist, So this is the book in its entirety,
(28:08):
is more about how we have thought about bears throughout history,
even getting into at least short entries on ewoks and
Fazzy Bear later on. But particularly he points to other
traditions along these lines of a female bear shaman character
a lady of the caves, and also reflects on, you know,
(28:30):
up to traditions of the of the ancient Greek goddess Artemis,
whose domain includes both the hunt and childbirth and is
also associated with bears. Interesting, but of course we just
get increasingly into the domain of speculation in this Yeah, again,
I think most experts kind of dismiss the notion that
(28:50):
that early Homo sapiens worshiped the cave bear to any
significant degree.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
By dismissed, I assume you mean not that they rule
it out, but they just say we don't have super
strong evidence.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Yeah. Yeah, that's what I get from it, because I
think it would be silly to say, you know, our
ancestors didn't notice these things at all, or they didn't
care about like it seems like there's room for there
to be that connection. But do we have the evidence
of it.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Yeah, it's just one of those mysteries. There's a lot
about the culture of prehistoric humans that's difficult to know
based on the evidence we have.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, real quick in passing before we move on to
more important matters, I will say that Storel has one entry,
actually a whole page in the book on gummy bears
also apparently known as dancing bears, which apparently have Germanic
origins going back to nineteen twenty two and are quote
now part of the German way of life. Okay, he
(29:47):
doesn't get into this issue in this twenty eighteen book,
but I wonder what he would make of the increasing
use of bear shaped gummies as a delivery system for
CBD and cannabis and cannabis related products. And and even
before this, I think, going back in the nineties, they
were being used in some cases to deliver vitamins. And
today you can get all manner of supplements in them,
(30:07):
So like the dancing bear kind of becomes this shumnistic item.
Perhaps once more, you know that's funny, but no real
connection to the cave bear there?
Speaker 3 (30:17):
Sorry, what would you make Also about the equivalency of
worms there and the fact that the gummy worms are
typically larger than the bears. That suggests something about Shai lude.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
To me, Ah, yes, solid point. For some reason, I've
gotten to the point where I accept that a bear
shaped gummy is an appropriate shape for some sort of
chemical delivery system as opposed to some of the other shapes.
Like for some reason, a worm is too silly for me,
Like it just seems like, why what are you doing?
It's ridiculous, irresponsible. Kids eat candy worms, but bears bears?
(30:51):
I don't know, Like, are we at the point where
I just you know, we don't I guess we don't
go through a lot of gummy bears. But it just
it's just like I would be suspicions of a gummy bear.
I'd be like, be careful, you don't know what's in
that bear.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
But a pure gummy worm, you're saying you're more likely
to trust that.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
I guess, But now I'm second guessing myself. I don't know.
I'm just suspicious of the whole gummy genre.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Okay, well, I've got one more thing I want to
talk about. So we've discussed the ways that animals adapt
to cave environments, but I wanted to talk about a
fascinating idea I came across in a spielology paper, which is,
what if some of the natural holes and recessions in
rock that we call caves were actually formed in part
(31:48):
not by standard inorganic processes like you know, lava tube
solidification in volcanic rock or the dissolution of limestone by water.
Instead were formed in part by animals essentially eating their
way through the rock. Let's look at a paper. So
my source here is by Charles A. Lundquist and William W.
(32:11):
Varnado Junior, called salt Ingestion Caves, published in the International
Journal of Spielology in the year two thousand and six,
So the authors kick things off by pointing out that,
of course animals need salt to survive. It is a
basic requirement in the body. Regular table salt is known
chemically as sodium chloride, and when we ingest it, our
(32:34):
bodies use both the sodium ions and the chloride ions
from that molecule for a number of functions. Salt is
necessary for our muscles to function properly, like we need
sodium so muscles can contract and relax. It's used in
our nervous systems to conduct impulses. It's used for all
kinds of things throughout the body, and most humans get
(32:57):
way more of it than we need because we add
some plemental salt to our food for taste.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
But of course.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Wild animals don't have the kind of ready access to
supplemental salt that we do. In the wild, carnivores can
usually get the salt they need by eating the flesh
of other animals, which naturally contains a good bit of it,
but for herbivores, getting enough salt can be difficult. The
sodium content of most terrestrial plants is quite low, and
(33:25):
since ancient times, humans have noticed that animals, especially herbivores,
sometimes gather at what are called salt licks, or more broadly,
mineral licks, places where there are rocks or soils that
animals can consume in some way to supplement the mineral
content of their diet, including minerals such as sodium salt.
(33:49):
This can include a range of behaviors in the wild,
like licking salty rocks on a mountainside, eating exposed clays
or other sediments that have a desirable mineral content. And
because herbivores are drawn to these salty rocks and soils,
hunters have long known about them as good places to
find game. So what does this have to do with caves? Well,
(34:11):
the author's right quote large vertebrate herbivores when they find
a salt bearing layer of rock in a cliff face
can over generations produce sizeable voids where they have removed
and consumed salty rock. These cavities that humans can enter
can have the characteristics of a cave as defined locally.
(34:33):
So that last sentence meaning that you know whatever people
call a cave, you know that varies from place to place,
but usually it means like a void in the rock,
that's large enough for a person to go into to enter,
and those types of voids can indeed be created by
animals removing the rock by eating it.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Wow, So you're saying that in some cases a cave
is naturally formed over geologic time by rainwater and so forth.
Times a deer just licks it until it's right a
deer licked it into the side of a mountain.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
That appears to be the case according to these authors.
So they look at several case studies in the paper.
One is a site referenced in some literature about the
Altai Mountains in Asia. The authors are talking about reports
from surveys of the Altai Mountains, specifically of a mountain
bearing shale formations near the confluence of the Kan River
(35:30):
and the Charch River. Apparently, the shale here is very salty,
and they quote a commentary by an author named Carl
Friedrich von Ledebour from eighteen twenty six, who writes of
the shale, quote, all livestock of the Kalmuks find this rock,
which gives the mountain an ash gray appearance, very desirable
(35:52):
and consume it in not small amounts, so that one
not infrequently finds grottos built in this way. Of course,
a grotto refers to a small cave, and this author
mentions that both domestic and wild animals come to this
mountain to eat the shale. Another example they mention is
a place in the United States. It's called rock House Cave.
(36:15):
It's a cave situated within the rock of a small
bluff in the US state of Mississippi. They say that
the entrance is roughly ten feet wide, but then the
cave actually widens once you go inside. It roughly doubles
in width. It's just about tall enough for an adult
to stand up, and it reaches about fifteen feet deep
into the bluff. And they say the surrounding rock is
(36:37):
mostly what the authors characterize as a soft, fine grained sandstone.
They say it is of the Kataboolah formation and it's
got a significant amount of sodium chloride in it. The
authors also say there's no evidence that water solution caused
the formation of this cave, and instead it appears that
it was caused by many generations of animals remove the
(37:00):
walls by licking. They say there is a rough surface
on the walls that seems to quite possibly have been
created just by animals licking it away over time. They
say it was probably first wild deer and possibly bison
that opened this cave up, and then maybe cattle later.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
But the most amazing example they cite is one from
eastern Africa. This so there's an extinct volcano on the
border between Kenya and Uganda. This volcano is called Mount
Elgon or Elganye. And on the side of this mountain
there are what I've read described elsewhere as ballroom sized caves,
(37:40):
large sizable caves that appear to have been at least
in part excavated by elephants. Elephants inside caves, yes, yes,
so there is some question about the role of the
elephants in creating the caves, but there is no question
that the cave that the elephants do into the caves
(38:01):
and consume rocks, that has been directly observed. That's the
thing that happens. So the most famous of the Mount
Elgon caves is known as Katoomb Cave k I t
u m and the authors propose that these caves were
formed in part by water solution, but also in part
because wild herbivores literally eat the rocks away and remove
(38:23):
them from the caverns.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Yeah, this is this is amazing. I have I've actually
seen footage of this. I don't remember which elephant documentary
I saw this in problem maybe more than one. Watched
a lot of elephant documentaries at one point and my
son's upbringing when he was super into elephants. But it's
it is amazing to behold. And these are large caves,
you know, starters elephants have to fit in them. But yeah,
(38:47):
I think ballroom seems appropriate based on the footage as
I remember it, because these look like the kind of
caverns that you might have filmed like a B movie
in or perhaps an episode of Star Trek took place in. Yeah, yeah,
I can see that.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Now. Elephants are not the only animals that go into
these caves to eat, to consume parts of the walls
and eat the rocks. Apparently, also buffaloes, antelopes, and sometimes
monkeys have been observed to go into the caves and
eat some of the some of the soft rocks that
line the walls. The authors say specifically Katoomb Cave to
give you a better idea about the size of one
(39:23):
of the big caves here. They say that the rock
face that the elephants generally go to get their minerals
from is about one hundred and sixty meters into the
mountain from the entrance, so that's a deep cave. And
they say that what happens is the elephants go in
and they usually loosen pieces of rock from the walls
(39:46):
of the cave with their tusks, so they're like digging
against the walls with their tusks. These pieces fall to
the floor and then they pick up the pieces with
their trunks and then they put the piece in their
mouth and chew it up, crush it with their teeth. Now,
what was not fully resolved at the time of this paper,
and from what I can tell, has still not been
fully resolved, is what are the relative contributions of the
(40:10):
different processes to how large the caves are?
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Like?
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Are the caves predominantly formed by inorganic solution and erosion
of the rock by water flow and then supplemented is
that excavation supplemented by elephants and other animals removing some
amount of rock, Or are the elephants and other animals
primarily responsible for hollowing out the caves? And there's just
some solution by water going on, Also what role may
(40:39):
have been played by human mining and other factors. So
the authors look at several analyzes of this and they
quote one researcher named Ian Redmond who did a study
of the cave in nineteen eighty four. Redmond and did
several months of field observations, watching the elephants and analyzing
even the mineral content of their droppings. Redmond wrote, quote,
(41:03):
the volume of Katoumb cave is on the order of
one point three million gallons or about five million liters. If,
for the sake of conservative argument, we suppose that elephant
excavations averaged just one quart per week, it would have
taken only one hundred thousand years for them to dig Katum.
The theory of elephant spieleogenesis cave creation is entirely plausible.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Yeah, amazing to consider, the author is. Also they cite
another study, this one by researchers named Donald McFarlane and
Joyce Lundberg. This was from two thousand and four, where
after field observations, these researchers suggested a multi step process
for cave formation that would go like this. They summarize
(41:48):
it as follows. So, first of all, there is a
cliff that forms. There's like water flowing off of the mountain,
they say, off of a cap rock layer, and it
roads some material from underneath. Then after that they say
that some more material clay sized material sediment is removed
(42:09):
from the floor of the cave by groundwater sapping. And
then they also say more mass is removed from the
cave by animal excavation. And then at some point there
are collapses within the cave. They write, quote collapse of
overlying beds makes piles of broken material which are removed
(42:29):
by action of water and animal geophagi rock eating. And
then finally they say step four is repeat This whole
process repeats over and over again. So they're saying that
it's a combination of material being removed by water flow
and then the cavern collapsing as material is removed and
(42:49):
supporting walls are removed, and then animals also remove parts
of the walls and remove some of the collapsed material
from above, and it just keeps going on.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Like that because those animals, they don't care about the
structural integrity of the cave. They just want to get
that salt, right. It's all they want is their fix. Now.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
Ultimately, the authors of this analysis, McFarlane and Lundberg, were
unable to say what the relative masses of rock removed
by water versus geophagi were, but they seem to believe
that the amount removed by the animals was significant. And
then coming back to the parent paper, the one by
Lundquist and Varnido Junior, they bring up something that was
(43:31):
interesting when thought about. When I was thinking about it,
in parallel to our discussion of batguana, was a kind
of alternative sunlight or base of the food chain in
deeper limestone caves. Speaking of the Mount Elgun caves, the
authors here note that quote a common feature in most
of the larger caves is the quantity of dung deposited
(43:51):
by beasts which have come to the caves from time
immemorial to lick or otherwise consume the agglomerate walls. Traces
of elephants using the caves are most common, and their
tusk marks are clearly recognizable where they have gouged the rock.
So actually a couple interesting parallels there. The connection to
the seeing where the elephants with their tusks have like
(44:14):
cut gashes in the rock in the walls of the
cave is kind of like the marks on the cave
walls left by the cave bears, but also all the poop,
all the poop of all the visitors accumulating over the
thousands of years.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah, it's crazy, and you know all this also reminds
me of episode we did a while back on giant sloths,
a particular variety of giant sloth that would have dug
itself kind of a burrow into a kind of like
deep into burrow, creating eventually over time as they reuse
(44:47):
these spaces a kind of tunnel in the earth.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Funny, you should mention that because the fourth case study
that the authors bring up in this paper is evidence
related to what's called Mylodon Cave in Patagonia, and they
say that it is possible that this is a case
of cave formation by salt ingestion long ago, this time
implicating extinct giant ground slots. This is fully speculative, but
(45:14):
they do highlight this as a possibility, explaining where this
cave came from.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (45:19):
But to come back and conclude the look at the
Mount Elgon caves. So they say, what we do know
is that animals come to these caves to consume mineral
laden soil and rock, so these caves could be thought
of as massive salt licks or mineral licks. There are
generally no permanent streams running out of the caves, so
that that's not an option for removal of cave material
(45:42):
by like permanent water passage. Some water does appear to
run out of the caves during flooding events, but how
much rock material is removed during these events in this
way is uncertain, so we still in the end don't
know the relation amounts. We don't know how much of
the cave formation is due to water solution versus how
(46:06):
much is due to animals eating the rock. But they
think that both processes contribute, and their judgment in the
end is that the contribution of the elephants is the
primary process.
Speaker 2 (46:19):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
Either way, it's amazing to imagine elephants going into caves
to eat the rocks.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
Yeah, it's amazing. And you know, we shouldn't cast too
much judgment. Like you mentioned earlier, humans very often don't
have to worry about getting enough salt we eat at
a restaurant. Once we get like a colossal salt bomb, right,
we get more than enough salt. We get an unhealthy
amount of salt ingested into our bodies. But if we
(46:47):
didn't have those food sources, we might be out there
looking the sides of mountains just like these various herbivores are.
Assuming we also didn't eat copious amounts of meat on
top of that, which is another factor to consider here.
Speaker 3 (47:02):
Yeah, all right, well does that do it for this
exploration of caves. I'm sure we'll be back in the future.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, there's all I mean, we've covered caves in the past. Yeah,
we'll be back in the future. And there are a
number of fascinating cave organisms that we didn't cover in
these episodes. And if you have favorites right in, we'd
love to hear from you, because we could always venture
back into the caves. You know, we don't reside there
all the time, but we go in from time to
time in order to discuss something interesting. All right, as usual,
(47:32):
we'll just remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener mail on Mondays, short form
episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set aside most
serious concerns just talk about a weird film on Weird
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rated and reviewed the podcast and you have the ability
(47:54):
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(48:15):
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(48:36):
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Speaker 3 (48:37):
Huge things as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
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You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
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Speaker 1 (49:00):
Have to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:15):
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with the
fourth and final part of our series on cave biology
and cave environments. If you haven't listened to the other
parts already, this will probably be a richer experience if
you go back and check those out first. In the
previous parts, we talked about some of the common characteristics
of cave environments, especially as they pertain to the life
(00:37):
forms that might inhabit caves. We talked about the different
types of organisms you find in caves, the ones that
are fully cave adapted versus the ones that are only visitors.
We talked about cave adapted organisms such as the blind
Mexican cavefish also known as the Mexican tetra, the om
which is a type of cave salamander found the dynark alps.
(01:02):
We talked about bat guano. We talked about snakes that
hiding in caves and attack bats as they come and go.
We got into a lot of great stuff, and today
we're here to round out the series.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, with a lot of Like a lot of our
multi part episodes, it's kind of like the first episode
is kind of like a lot of the initial information
you need, and then the second episode this is where
you find some of the core stuff that attracted us
to the topic to begin with Part three we kind
of like fill in with a little more data some
other interesting entries in said series in the fourth episode
(01:35):
or whatever the final episode happens to be. Generally, that's
where it's like, what's left, what's the thing that came
up in our research that we didn't know we were
going to be excited about or or or in some cases,
maybe what's the weird tangential connection that also came up
or we found ourselves drifting into the in our journey. Oh,
I think that's a good way to characterize it. So
(01:57):
what have you got, Rob Well? I I mentioned this earlier.
I forget which of the earlier episodes, but I mentioned
the extinct cave bear in Passing, and I would just
kind of I kept touching back in on the subject
as we were working on the other episodes, and finally
I was like, Yeah, we need to go in a
little deeper and talk about what is ultimately like a
really fascinating organism. There have been disagreements and mysteries regarding it,
(02:22):
and it is an organism that, while no longer with us,
does overlap with our ancestors. You know, it was an
ice age creature. I included here for you, Joe, a
reconstruction and image of what one of these bears would
have looked like potentially, And in a bit I'll get
into like what are some of the main anatomical features.
(02:43):
But just looking at you can tell this is a
very huge bear. It doesn't look that different from say,
like a large, you know, grizzly bear, brown bear of
some sort. Coloration is brownish, but one might notice that
the head is enormous, has a much bigger head than
one might expect, certainly on an extant bear.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Yeah, it looks a lot like a grizzly. Though I'm
no bear expert, it does appear to me in this
reconstruction to have a somewhat shorter snout and the sort
of boxier.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Head boxier and I'm to understand would have been would
have would have appeared wider as well. So we're talking
about Ursus Spilaeus. It's a member of the Ursus genus
alongside the brown bear, which includes the grizzly subspecies, among others,
the polar bear, the American black bear, and the Asian
(03:38):
black bear. That means it's naturally a member of the
larger Ursudae family, which also includes the likes of giant pandas,
short face bears, and others.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Oh I didn't realize pandas were technically in that family.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah, yeah, Like one of the interesting things about pandas
is that pandas are herbivores for the moment part, but
they still have a carnivores digestive system, and they still
have like carnivore jeanes, So they're pretty fascinating in their
own right. You know, it's easy to overlook how interesting
pandas are, especially if you go to a zoo and
(04:14):
you see one in captivity that is probably not doing
much other than sleeping or eating bamboo.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
The last time I went to a zoo, the thing
I saw that filled me with the most joy was
actually vicarious joy through a panda. When I saw the
feeders through some new bamboo into the enclosure, and the
panda went up to the pile of bamboo and literally
just flopped in it. Just flopped down in its food like, ah,
give it to me.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
It is literally their favorite thing, Yeah, rolling around in it.
More on this connection to the panda in in a
minute here, but yeah, the cave bear when extinct. I
do want to highlight that the exact timing for this
depends on exactly what sources and what evidence you're looking at.
I've seen between twenty eight twenty seven thousand years ago
(05:00):
during the last glacial maximum. I've seen twenty four thousand
years ago, and in some sources. Some of the older sources,
you also see fifteen thousand years ago cited as an
extinction point, but I believe an earlier point in twenty eight,
twenty seven, maybe twenty four is generally favored by scientists today.
That's generally the range, the broader range in which I'm
(05:21):
tending to see the numbers and the sources I was
looking at. And the interesting thing about the cave bear, too,
is that this animal is a recent enough denizen of
the planet that we have been able to study its
soft tissue, in addition to its bones and its actual
you know, we were able to study like the chemical
composition of its bones. There was even a frozen specimen
discovered in twenty twenty, I believe, and we've been able
(05:42):
to sequence its genome, so we were able to learn
a fair amount about what they were and what they did,
though certain mysteries remain about, you know, their exact lifestyles,
their interactions with other organisms and so forth. Well, let's
come back to the cave theme, right, because that's the
umbrella on which we're just under which we're discussing the
(06:03):
cave bear. Here. We're of course, not talking about an
obligate cave dweller. This is not a blind, hairless bear
living in the depths, as I'm suddenly realizing. As interesting
as that might be, I'm assuming some fantasy weaver has
done something like that before. But now this would have
had at best been a troglophilic creature.
Speaker 3 (06:25):
Okay, so the troglophilic creature enjoys visiting caves. It may
visit caves for a number of reasons, but it doesn't
live there permanently, and it's not biologically adapted to full
time life in the caves.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
Yeah, Like it's not just hanging out in there all
the time, eating bats or anything. But you know, the
cave moniker can be confusing with a lot of these species,
because of course we speak of cave men either in
terms of prehistoric Homo sapiens or Neanderthals, though even with
the latter, who certainly did utilize cave environments as did humans,
they used open air sites for various activities as well,
(06:59):
it seems, so it's not like they just lived in
caves or or and they're certainly not creatures that were
obligate cave dwellers. Plus, the cave moniker sometimes has as
much to do, if not more, to do with the
places where we've discovered the remains, because, as we've touched
on before, I think in this series and probably in general,
like caves are a great place for remains to be preserved.
(07:23):
To some degree. I saw a paper that was quoting
an expert on cave bears. It was like the bears
slept in caves and they had the good fortune to
die in them, something to that effect. You know, they're like,
fortunately for us, they died in caves a lot, and
so we have a lot of remains to look at.
But anyway, just because we have come to refer to
(07:43):
a creature as a cave animal, it doesn't necessarily mean
that it lived in caves. The main example of this
era would be the cave lion or Panthera spileea, also
known as the step lion, which is now understood to
have largely lived in open areas, possibly woodlands. But we
know them a lot of We know a lot about
(08:04):
them from skeletal remains found in caves, thus cave lions.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
But it's not thought that that's where they spent a
huge amount of their time. It's more just like we
happened to have gotten some remains from caves.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
That's right, yeah, I mean their remains found in caves
are apparently best understood as on one hand, perhaps the
accumulations or middens of extinct cave hyenas. These this was
all This is also known as the ice age spotted
hyena that would have scavenged carcasses and brought them back
to the caves where they lived, or at least the
(08:39):
cave openings where they live. These would have been. This
is an example of something that did live in caves
based on our current understanding, and so they would have hoarded, scavenged,
and killed prey in such places while also competing apparently
with Neanderthals for some of the same cave environments.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
But back to the cave lion. It is also thought
that they might have ventured into caves during the winter,
especially in search of hibernating bears that might in some
cases be easier to pick off, especially if they were
desperate for the food. And they also may have periodically
entered caves in order to steal food away from cave hyenas,
though to be sure, it seems like they largely preyed
(09:18):
on larger wild herbivores like the wild horse and the bison.
Either way, cave lions wound up in caves, and cave
environments helped preserve their bones for future excavation by humans, who,
at least at first were like, oh, this is a
cave line. We found it in a cave.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
But I assume you're saying that researchers do not believe
the same kind of naming error was made with cave bears.
The cave bears really do seem largely involved with caves.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yes, yes, that's the consensus. So you know, what were
cave bears. We talked a little bit about what they
look like already. They were very large bears comparable to
or even larger than any of the bears we know today,
even the polar bears and Kodiak bears, which depending on
who you're talking to, these are kind of like the
(10:05):
two extant species of bears that are often held up
as the biggest. So male cave bears could range and weight.
One estimate I saw was three fifty to six hundred
kilograms or seven hundred and seventy to three hundred and
twenty pounds. I've also seen like the four hundred to
one thousand kilogram estimate, about eight hundred and eighty to
(10:28):
twenty two hundred pounds. Again, it's going to vary. The
males were bigger than the females and so forth. But
anyway you cut it, big bears, big heavy bears. Their
weight were have fluctuated depending on you know, where they
were seasonally, where their diet was, what the overall climate
happened to be. But yes, these were very large bears.
(10:49):
And therefore, as you can imagine, not just any cave
is going to do. Cave has to be large enough
to hold a bear. Now, speaking of these caves, I
was reading about them a little bit. I was looking
a few different sources. But I've had this book on
my shelf for years and I hadn't really cracked it open.
(11:11):
But it's by one wolf Dee Storal titled Bear Myth,
Animal and Icon. This author, by the way, I think
he's generally more considered an anthropologist and an ethnobotanist, and
I'm to understand his views have ventured into some areas
that may be considered more esoteric and even controversial, but
I don't think any of that applies to this work. Okay, Anyway,
(11:34):
the author here points to another connection who is kind
of similar to something we discussed I believe in the
last episode with the Ohm, a connection between an actual
cave organism and traditions concerning the dragon. There's a cave
in Austria known as Drachenhole or Dragon's Hole, so named
(11:57):
because the copious amounts of cave bear bones in there
were apparently it interpreted during the Middle Ages as the
bones of dragons. The cave is located near a place
called mix Nits and is associated with the legend of
the dragon Slayer of mixed Nits. I was looking around,
I couldn't find what felt like a definitive analysis or
(12:18):
retelling of this legend. But I saw some ride ups
where it seems like it's, you know, you, on one level,
your typical tale of a dragon slayer. But it did
seem based on the one telling I found that the
dragon slayer here uses an ingenious trap rather than overt
combat to kill the dragon. Like it has to do
with like a sharpened spikes and left out to gouge
(12:41):
into the dragon's flesh and then it goes off and dies.
That sort of thing, you know, kind of your predator
model of overcoming your foe.
Speaker 3 (12:49):
Oh that's my kind of tale. I always love a
monster trap.
Speaker 2 (12:52):
Yeah, so you're probably wondering, Okay, this cave is full
of cave bare bones. How many bones were talking about?
You know, we're talking about like two or three individuals,
maybe a dozen individuals, you know, maybe a dusty old
set of cave bones near one corner, a skull in
the other. No, no, no, we're talking about the bones
of an estimated thirty thousand cave bears. Thirty thousand.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Yeah. Other bones were apparently also found in this particular cave,
including those those of the cave line apparently, but we're
mostly talking about cave bears here and in quite an abundance.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
You have to think how long they would have been
accumulating there for. That's unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Yeah, yeah, like we would be dealing with a situation
here where the bears lived in these caves, hibernated in
these caves, and died in these caves for thousands and
thousands of years. So like, recent genetic data apparently indicates
that cave beer populations in Europe, specifically along the Danube
River were stable for a good one hundred thousand years
or more. So, yeah, you're dealing with lots of bears
(13:56):
living and dying in these locations.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
That is incredible.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Now, the caves, specifically this Austrian cave, the system was
apparently excavated during the nineteenth century because the soil found
inside of these caves is rich, was rich in bones
and bear manure that it accumulated over these vast periods
of time, and they proved usable as phosphate fertilizer, and
(14:21):
there was a shortage during this time period. Storal rites
that sixty trains with fifty cars each were filled with
the stuff and also points out that a cave near Velberg, Germany,
was also excavated for its cave bear riches during this
time period. Now, these aren't the only two European caves
that there's evidence of a lot of cave bear activity.
(14:43):
I read in passing examples of caves and for instance
Spain and Romania that also provided a great deal of
cave bear remains. Now speaking to their death in these caves,
because you know, it's one thing to sleep in the cave,
and there is evidence we'll get to that in a second.
There is evidence already of like the bears having lived
(15:04):
in and slept in the caves, but they also died there.
And I've read that it's thought that cave bears may
have frequently died during hibernation, especially during particularly trying time periods,
which we'll get to here, because if an individual couldn't
put on enough weight heading into winter and or environmental
conditions were particularly dire, they just might not emerge again
(15:27):
in the spring. Plus we already mentioned that in some
cases you might have predators venturing into those caves to
try and find an easy bear to pick off. And
it's any easy mathematics to imagine, like, okay, if you
have a weakened bear in a hibernation state, one that
might not be surviving the winter anyway, Like that's ideal
(15:49):
biomass to pick off. Now. I think everyone's familiar enough
with the fat bear week craze these days to know, yeah,
that bears have to pack it on, and we find
some sport and amusement in figuring out, like which bears
are packing on the most and what do extant bears
(16:11):
eat in order to go into hibernation, While the answer
is what do you got? They're omnivores, anything is on
the table, right, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:20):
I think a lot of the ones that we're familiar
with are these ones photographed in Alaska. From what I understand,
they're probably going to be eating a lot of like
river fish, like salmon.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Yeah. Yeah. The cave bears, though, this would have been
a different matter. So research has differed at different times
on whether the bears were strictly herbivores or if they
were mostly herbivores. At the very least, they seem to
have depended far more on the consumption of plant matter
than pretty much any extent bear, with the obvious exception
(16:51):
of the giant panda. These cave bears would have gone
out and eaten a lot of vegetation, and we see
that reflected in like they're just their anatomy. So I
was looking at the work of Alejandro Perez Ramos at
the University of Malaga in Spain. This would have been
a twenty twenty study. The researcher here points out that
(17:11):
the cave bears were built in such a way. Their
skulls were built in such a way that they could
only chew with their back teeth. So extent bears, the
bears we have today can chew with the front as
well as the back, and therefore have the correct dental
build to eat vegetation or meat, switching back and forth
(17:33):
between the two depending on what's available. You know. So
if there are a lot of fish on hand, bam,
the bear bears like grizzlies and so forth, they're good
to go, get in there and eat that meat. Dead whale. Likewise,
get in there scaving some of that meat. Oh what's this?
You only have berries? Or oh somebody left the door
open to their house. You know, they can make do
(17:55):
with what's available, but again not the case with bears.
A chemical analysis of cave bear bones has also revealed
a mostly plant based diet. So the cave bear had
evolved to a point at which there was no going
back in a swift manner anyway, such as the demands
brought on by sudden changes in climate, and this would
(18:16):
seem to be a major factor in their extinction, if
not the major factor in their extinction. And this seems
to be the answer that most of the current research
is pointing to. But it also reveals some other interesting
things about them, you know, the build of their skull here,
because they also had much larger sinuses in exchange for
that lack of robust front teeth. And this is interesting
(18:40):
especially because extant bears are already famous super smellers. I
think if you've ever ventured into bear territory, you have
been warned. You know, don't leave, say, chapstick in your car,
because a bear can smell that, and a bear will
want to come see what kind of sweet, delicious fruity
food you have hidden away inside of your automobile. Oh.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
I just imagining the bears going wild over like the
synthetic kinds of fruity flavors that you get in all
these products, Like what is funberry? I must discover exactly?
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Yeah, I mean it's This is again with something we've
touched on already in this series. You know, like how
how difficult or impossible it is for human beings to
really put themselves in the sense world of another organism
that has, you know, a sense array different from our own.
And smell is another one of those areas. So take,
(19:36):
for instance, a bloodhound, a canine. Canines in general, but
specifically something like a bloodhound is already pretty famous for
being a super smeller. That is, they're just dogs in general.
They're like their sense of smell is just a different
part of their being, you know. You see that when
you see a dog like riding around with its human
(19:57):
in a vehicle and it has its head out the window, right,
it's like it's like unlike all the psychedelics at that moment.
And yet I've seen it estimated that a bear, and
again not a cave bear, just bears in general, bears
we have today, I've read that their sense of smell
is seven times better than a bloodhound, and that would
mean that their sense of smell is thousands of times
(20:20):
more powerful than a human beings. And yet the cave
bear likely had an even keener sense of smell. If
we can even imagine such a thing, likely great hearing
as well, but on the other hand, reduced eye sight
and a smaller brain that you might than you might
expect with such a large head. And I'm suspecting here
that you know that would also have to do with
(20:41):
its mode of life at this point in its evolution,
Like it it's just going around eating as much vegetation
as it can, sifting through these various sources of vegetation,
but maybe not having to be as clever and opportunistic
as a true omnivore would be. But anyway, all this
would seem to be wound up in their extinction as well,
(21:03):
because somewhere around twenty four thousand years ago, around the
time when their age ended, the age of the cave
bear comes to an end, temperatures plummeted. This would have
been the last glacial maximum period. Cooler tempts meant less
time and less plant matter to bulk up on before
going into hibernation, so the cave bears likely couldn't keep up.
(21:26):
They couldn't bulk up, and again could not adjust their
diet like other bear species. So the bear species that
survived these cold times were the ones that could diversify
that could go in more on the meat perhaps than
they had been and in many cases, yeah, this would
mean that you would have cave bears crawling into their
caves to hibernate with or without young and simply never
(21:49):
getting back up again. I alluded to this earlier, but yeah,
in the caves that they called home, we do have
more than just their bones to speak of them. So they,
like a lot of animals, they ended up leaving claw
marks on the walls in some cases, and they also
dug shallow depressions in the floor, likely as places to sleep,
and you can find images of these from various European
(22:12):
cave systems. You know, they're not especially flashy, but it's
this sort of large bear shaped indention in the ground
and many of these remained to this day, and some
of those claw marks, by the way, would later be
incorporated into the cave art of Homo sapiens.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Oh interesting, Like you mean like that humans made their
art around pre existing claw marks in the walls and
like made that part of the art.
Speaker 2 (22:38):
Yeah. Yeah, Like I believe that's the case with some
of the art in France's Chauvet caves, where you have
depictions of cave bears, but also evidence of cave bears,
including claw marks. Now, speaking of humans, there, of course,
there's long been some mystery over exactly what sort of
relationships the Anderthals and Homo sapiens had with the cave bears.
(23:00):
I mean, we're humans. We can't help it. We find
out that we were alive at all during the same
time period, We're like, what about us? How do we
factor into this this fascinating and majestic scenario. What were
we doing? And did we ride them? Did we ride them?
Did we worship them? Yeah, there was this much popularized
idea that early humans worshiped cave bears, and it does
(23:22):
seem like there's some potential evidence for this, but apparently
this has long been disputed and sort of largely pushed
out of the way. This would have been the basis
for fictional works like the novel Clan of the Cave Bear,
but there's still various mysteries along these lines. You know,
they will never know one hundred percent what our ancient
ancient ancestors really thought about these creatures. And it's also
(23:46):
easy to simplify what we thought about them that like, oh,
did we worship them? Or did we eat them or
did we run from them? And of course, you know,
even our prehistoric ancestors I think would have had the
mental complexity to do all three, depending on where you
are in a given day and so forth.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
I seem to I think it's been years now, but
I have a memory of coming across some interesting claims
on the Internet about about, like, you know, prehistoric humans
and their specific beliefs regarding bears, and I was like,
what's the source of this, Like what's the evidence for it?
And I could never actually track it down, Like it
seems like there's just a lot of claims floating around
(24:27):
on the internet about prehistoric humans and bears.
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Yeah, I mean, I guess on one level, it's like
we do acknowledge the fact that human, ancient humans and
prehistoric humans, they acknowledged these large creatures in their natural world. Yea,
they had relationships with various creatures in their natural world,
and they seem to have superstitious and or mythological ideas
(24:52):
about them. We talked about some of the earliest images
and past episodes of the show where these people would
combine human and animal imagery into a single entity. Though
exactly what is meant by that, We're not sure.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Yeah, this actually came up in a listener mail I
did while you were out recently, a listener wrote in
about our episode on the Loewenmine this, you know, this
carving that has been interpreted as depicting a sort of
a human body with the lion's head. Though there's some
dispute about whether that's the correct interpretation of what it's
supposed to be, but that seems like a common interpretation
(25:27):
and so yeah, this raised these interesting questions about like,
when did we start forming ideas about creatures that did
not exist in nature.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, it is hard for us to figure out the
exact artistic intent. For example, going back to the Chouve
Cave in France, this is a cave that contains human
illustrations of cave bears among other animals, copious amounts of
cave bear bones, cave bear claw marks on the walls.
It has floor depressions made by the bears. But one
(25:57):
chamber here also apparently has a single cave bear skull
that seemed to have been placed on a stone slab
in the center of the chamber. But it's impossible to
say why this is the case. Were they worshiping the
bear or a particular bear. Was it just a curiosity,
was it some form of superstition or what? Did it
(26:19):
represent some tangible connection between these people and their way
of life to the bear, or was it something more abstract. Now,
apparently we do know from some skeletal evidence this would
be in rare cases, some evidence of butchery. And also
there may have been another example that was more directly
(26:39):
tied to some sort of like hunting weapon, but at
least butchery evidence that shows that humans at least sometimes
hunted or killed, or at least butchered cave bears, but
is pointed out in Andrew Curry's twenty ten Fate of
the Cave Bear article ver smithsonian dot com, citing anthropologist
Eric Trinkhaus, it's unlikely that human hunting impacted the cave
(27:03):
bear's existence or led to its extinction. Trenkyles points out
faced many lethal threats during this time, and the cave bear,
if provoked, was certainly one of them. I mean, just
because it doesn't really eat meat doesn't mean that an
animal this big and this ferocious could not kill you.
(27:23):
So it's unlikely, according to this expert, that humans tangled
with it all that much. But they might have sometimes
gone after hibernating bears or hunted them in other isolated
events for one reason or another. So it happened, but
probably not all that often. Still there's a Again, there's
(27:44):
a lot of room for some level of supernatural consideration
of the cave bear. Going back to the work of
a Wolf Storel in his book, he writes that surely quote,
any animal that can go in and out of the
womb of the Great Goddess without incident is surely all
a guardian of fertility and birth. Again, he's predominantly an
anthropologist and athnobotanist, So this is the book in its entirety,
(28:08):
is more about how we have thought about bears throughout history,
even getting into at least short entries on ewoks and
Fazzy Bear later on. But particularly he points to other
traditions along these lines of a female bear shaman character
a lady of the caves, and also reflects on, you know,
(28:30):
up to traditions of the of the ancient Greek goddess Artemis,
whose domain includes both the hunt and childbirth and is
also associated with bears. Interesting, but of course we just
get increasingly into the domain of speculation in this Yeah, again,
I think most experts kind of dismiss the notion that
(28:50):
that early Homo sapiens worshiped the cave bear to any
significant degree.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
By dismissed, I assume you mean not that they rule
it out, but they just say we don't have super
strong evidence.
Speaker 2 (29:02):
Yeah. Yeah, that's what I get from it, because I
think it would be silly to say, you know, our
ancestors didn't notice these things at all, or they didn't
care about like it seems like there's room for there
to be that connection. But do we have the evidence
of it.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Yeah, it's just one of those mysteries. There's a lot
about the culture of prehistoric humans that's difficult to know
based on the evidence we have.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
Yeah, real quick in passing before we move on to
more important matters, I will say that Storel has one entry,
actually a whole page in the book on gummy bears
also apparently known as dancing bears, which apparently have Germanic
origins going back to nineteen twenty two and are quote
now part of the German way of life. Okay, he
(29:47):
doesn't get into this issue in this twenty eighteen book,
but I wonder what he would make of the increasing
use of bear shaped gummies as a delivery system for
CBD and cannabis and cannabis related products. And and even
before this, I think, going back in the nineties, they
were being used in some cases to deliver vitamins. And
today you can get all manner of supplements in them,
(30:07):
So like the dancing bear kind of becomes this shumnistic item.
Perhaps once more, you know that's funny, but no real
connection to the cave bear there?
Speaker 3 (30:17):
Sorry, what would you make Also about the equivalency of
worms there and the fact that the gummy worms are
typically larger than the bears. That suggests something about Shai lude.
Speaker 2 (30:26):
To me, Ah, yes, solid point. For some reason, I've
gotten to the point where I accept that a bear
shaped gummy is an appropriate shape for some sort of
chemical delivery system as opposed to some of the other shapes.
Like for some reason, a worm is too silly for me,
Like it just seems like, why what are you doing?
It's ridiculous, irresponsible. Kids eat candy worms, but bears bears?
(30:51):
I don't know, Like, are we at the point where
I just you know, we don't I guess we don't
go through a lot of gummy bears. But it just
it's just like I would be suspicions of a gummy bear.
I'd be like, be careful, you don't know what's in
that bear.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
But a pure gummy worm, you're saying you're more likely
to trust that.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
I guess, But now I'm second guessing myself. I don't know.
I'm just suspicious of the whole gummy genre.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
Okay, well, I've got one more thing I want to
talk about. So we've discussed the ways that animals adapt
to cave environments, but I wanted to talk about a
fascinating idea I came across in a spielology paper, which is,
what if some of the natural holes and recessions in
rock that we call caves were actually formed in part
(31:48):
not by standard inorganic processes like you know, lava tube
solidification in volcanic rock or the dissolution of limestone by water.
Instead were formed in part by animals essentially eating their
way through the rock. Let's look at a paper. So
my source here is by Charles A. Lundquist and William W.
(32:11):
Varnado Junior, called salt Ingestion Caves, published in the International
Journal of Spielology in the year two thousand and six,
So the authors kick things off by pointing out that,
of course animals need salt to survive. It is a
basic requirement in the body. Regular table salt is known
chemically as sodium chloride, and when we ingest it, our
(32:34):
bodies use both the sodium ions and the chloride ions
from that molecule for a number of functions. Salt is
necessary for our muscles to function properly, like we need
sodium so muscles can contract and relax. It's used in
our nervous systems to conduct impulses. It's used for all
kinds of things throughout the body, and most humans get
(32:57):
way more of it than we need because we add
some plemental salt to our food for taste.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
But of course.
Speaker 3 (33:03):
Wild animals don't have the kind of ready access to
supplemental salt that we do. In the wild, carnivores can
usually get the salt they need by eating the flesh
of other animals, which naturally contains a good bit of it,
but for herbivores, getting enough salt can be difficult. The
sodium content of most terrestrial plants is quite low, and
(33:25):
since ancient times, humans have noticed that animals, especially herbivores,
sometimes gather at what are called salt licks, or more broadly,
mineral licks, places where there are rocks or soils that
animals can consume in some way to supplement the mineral
content of their diet, including minerals such as sodium salt.
(33:49):
This can include a range of behaviors in the wild,
like licking salty rocks on a mountainside, eating exposed clays
or other sediments that have a desirable mineral content. And
because herbivores are drawn to these salty rocks and soils,
hunters have long known about them as good places to
find game. So what does this have to do with caves? Well,
(34:11):
the author's right quote large vertebrate herbivores when they find
a salt bearing layer of rock in a cliff face
can over generations produce sizeable voids where they have removed
and consumed salty rock. These cavities that humans can enter
can have the characteristics of a cave as defined locally.
(34:33):
So that last sentence meaning that you know whatever people
call a cave, you know that varies from place to place,
but usually it means like a void in the rock,
that's large enough for a person to go into to enter,
and those types of voids can indeed be created by
animals removing the rock by eating it.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Wow, So you're saying that in some cases a cave
is naturally formed over geologic time by rainwater and so forth.
Times a deer just licks it until it's right a
deer licked it into the side of a mountain.
Speaker 3 (35:06):
That appears to be the case according to these authors.
So they look at several case studies in the paper.
One is a site referenced in some literature about the
Altai Mountains in Asia. The authors are talking about reports
from surveys of the Altai Mountains, specifically of a mountain
bearing shale formations near the confluence of the Kan River
(35:30):
and the Charch River. Apparently, the shale here is very salty,
and they quote a commentary by an author named Carl
Friedrich von Ledebour from eighteen twenty six, who writes of
the shale, quote, all livestock of the Kalmuks find this rock,
which gives the mountain an ash gray appearance, very desirable
(35:52):
and consume it in not small amounts, so that one
not infrequently finds grottos built in this way. Of course,
a grotto refers to a small cave, and this author
mentions that both domestic and wild animals come to this
mountain to eat the shale. Another example they mention is
a place in the United States. It's called rock House Cave.
(36:15):
It's a cave situated within the rock of a small
bluff in the US state of Mississippi. They say that
the entrance is roughly ten feet wide, but then the
cave actually widens once you go inside. It roughly doubles
in width. It's just about tall enough for an adult
to stand up, and it reaches about fifteen feet deep
into the bluff. And they say the surrounding rock is
(36:37):
mostly what the authors characterize as a soft, fine grained sandstone.
They say it is of the Kataboolah formation and it's
got a significant amount of sodium chloride in it. The
authors also say there's no evidence that water solution caused
the formation of this cave, and instead it appears that
it was caused by many generations of animals remove the
(37:00):
walls by licking. They say there is a rough surface
on the walls that seems to quite possibly have been
created just by animals licking it away over time. They
say it was probably first wild deer and possibly bison
that opened this cave up, and then maybe cattle later.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Oh wow.
Speaker 3 (37:17):
But the most amazing example they cite is one from
eastern Africa. This so there's an extinct volcano on the
border between Kenya and Uganda. This volcano is called Mount
Elgon or Elganye. And on the side of this mountain
there are what I've read described elsewhere as ballroom sized caves,
(37:40):
large sizable caves that appear to have been at least
in part excavated by elephants. Elephants inside caves, yes, yes,
so there is some question about the role of the
elephants in creating the caves, but there is no question
that the cave that the elephants do into the caves
(38:01):
and consume rocks, that has been directly observed. That's the
thing that happens. So the most famous of the Mount
Elgon caves is known as Katoomb Cave k I t
u m and the authors propose that these caves were
formed in part by water solution, but also in part
because wild herbivores literally eat the rocks away and remove
(38:23):
them from the caverns.
Speaker 2 (38:24):
Yeah, this is this is amazing. I have I've actually
seen footage of this. I don't remember which elephant documentary
I saw this in problem maybe more than one. Watched
a lot of elephant documentaries at one point and my
son's upbringing when he was super into elephants. But it's
it is amazing to behold. And these are large caves,
you know, starters elephants have to fit in them. But yeah,
(38:47):
I think ballroom seems appropriate based on the footage as
I remember it, because these look like the kind of
caverns that you might have filmed like a B movie
in or perhaps an episode of Star Trek took place in. Yeah, yeah,
I can see that.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Now. Elephants are not the only animals that go into
these caves to eat, to consume parts of the walls
and eat the rocks. Apparently, also buffaloes, antelopes, and sometimes
monkeys have been observed to go into the caves and
eat some of the some of the soft rocks that
line the walls. The authors say specifically Katoomb Cave to
give you a better idea about the size of one
(39:23):
of the big caves here. They say that the rock
face that the elephants generally go to get their minerals
from is about one hundred and sixty meters into the
mountain from the entrance, so that's a deep cave. And
they say that what happens is the elephants go in
and they usually loosen pieces of rock from the walls
(39:46):
of the cave with their tusks, so they're like digging
against the walls with their tusks. These pieces fall to
the floor and then they pick up the pieces with
their trunks and then they put the piece in their
mouth and chew it up, crush it with their teeth. Now,
what was not fully resolved at the time of this paper,
and from what I can tell, has still not been
fully resolved, is what are the relative contributions of the
(40:10):
different processes to how large the caves are?
Speaker 1 (40:14):
Like?
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Are the caves predominantly formed by inorganic solution and erosion
of the rock by water flow and then supplemented is
that excavation supplemented by elephants and other animals removing some
amount of rock, Or are the elephants and other animals
primarily responsible for hollowing out the caves? And there's just
some solution by water going on, Also what role may
(40:39):
have been played by human mining and other factors. So
the authors look at several analyzes of this and they
quote one researcher named Ian Redmond who did a study
of the cave in nineteen eighty four. Redmond and did
several months of field observations, watching the elephants and analyzing
even the mineral content of their droppings. Redmond wrote, quote,
(41:03):
the volume of Katoumb cave is on the order of
one point three million gallons or about five million liters. If,
for the sake of conservative argument, we suppose that elephant
excavations averaged just one quart per week, it would have
taken only one hundred thousand years for them to dig Katum.
The theory of elephant spieleogenesis cave creation is entirely plausible.
Speaker 2 (41:27):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (41:27):
Yeah, amazing to consider, the author is. Also they cite
another study, this one by researchers named Donald McFarlane and
Joyce Lundberg. This was from two thousand and four, where
after field observations, these researchers suggested a multi step process
for cave formation that would go like this. They summarize
(41:48):
it as follows. So, first of all, there is a
cliff that forms. There's like water flowing off of the mountain,
they say, off of a cap rock layer, and it
roads some material from underneath. Then after that they say
that some more material clay sized material sediment is removed
(42:09):
from the floor of the cave by groundwater sapping. And
then they also say more mass is removed from the
cave by animal excavation. And then at some point there
are collapses within the cave. They write, quote collapse of
overlying beds makes piles of broken material which are removed
(42:29):
by action of water and animal geophagi rock eating. And
then finally they say step four is repeat This whole
process repeats over and over again. So they're saying that
it's a combination of material being removed by water flow
and then the cavern collapsing as material is removed and
(42:49):
supporting walls are removed, and then animals also remove parts
of the walls and remove some of the collapsed material
from above, and it just keeps going on.
Speaker 2 (43:00):
Like that because those animals, they don't care about the
structural integrity of the cave. They just want to get
that salt, right. It's all they want is their fix. Now.
Speaker 3 (43:09):
Ultimately, the authors of this analysis, McFarlane and Lundberg, were
unable to say what the relative masses of rock removed
by water versus geophagi were, but they seem to believe
that the amount removed by the animals was significant. And
then coming back to the parent paper, the one by
Lundquist and Varnido Junior, they bring up something that was
(43:31):
interesting when thought about. When I was thinking about it,
in parallel to our discussion of batguana, was a kind
of alternative sunlight or base of the food chain in
deeper limestone caves. Speaking of the Mount Elgun caves, the
authors here note that quote a common feature in most
of the larger caves is the quantity of dung deposited
(43:51):
by beasts which have come to the caves from time
immemorial to lick or otherwise consume the agglomerate walls. Traces
of elephants using the caves are most common, and their
tusk marks are clearly recognizable where they have gouged the rock.
So actually a couple interesting parallels there. The connection to
the seeing where the elephants with their tusks have like
(44:14):
cut gashes in the rock in the walls of the
cave is kind of like the marks on the cave
walls left by the cave bears, but also all the poop,
all the poop of all the visitors accumulating over the
thousands of years.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
Yeah, it's crazy, and you know all this also reminds
me of episode we did a while back on giant sloths,
a particular variety of giant sloth that would have dug
itself kind of a burrow into a kind of like
deep into burrow, creating eventually over time as they reuse
(44:47):
these spaces a kind of tunnel in the earth.
Speaker 3 (44:50):
Funny, you should mention that because the fourth case study
that the authors bring up in this paper is evidence
related to what's called Mylodon Cave in Patagonia, and they
say that it is possible that this is a case
of cave formation by salt ingestion long ago, this time
implicating extinct giant ground slots. This is fully speculative, but
(45:14):
they do highlight this as a possibility, explaining where this
cave came from.
Speaker 2 (45:18):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (45:19):
But to come back and conclude the look at the
Mount Elgon caves. So they say, what we do know
is that animals come to these caves to consume mineral
laden soil and rock, so these caves could be thought
of as massive salt licks or mineral licks. There are
generally no permanent streams running out of the caves, so
that that's not an option for removal of cave material
(45:42):
by like permanent water passage. Some water does appear to
run out of the caves during flooding events, but how
much rock material is removed during these events in this
way is uncertain, so we still in the end don't
know the relation amounts. We don't know how much of
the cave formation is due to water solution versus how
(46:06):
much is due to animals eating the rock. But they
think that both processes contribute, and their judgment in the
end is that the contribution of the elephants is the
primary process.
Speaker 2 (46:19):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
Either way, it's amazing to imagine elephants going into caves
to eat the rocks.
Speaker 2 (46:24):
Yeah, it's amazing. And you know, we shouldn't cast too
much judgment. Like you mentioned earlier, humans very often don't
have to worry about getting enough salt we eat at
a restaurant. Once we get like a colossal salt bomb, right,
we get more than enough salt. We get an unhealthy
amount of salt ingested into our bodies. But if we
(46:47):
didn't have those food sources, we might be out there
looking the sides of mountains just like these various herbivores are.
Assuming we also didn't eat copious amounts of meat on
top of that, which is another factor to consider here.
Speaker 3 (47:02):
Yeah, all right, well does that do it for this
exploration of caves. I'm sure we'll be back in the future.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, there's all I mean, we've covered caves in the past. Yeah,
we'll be back in the future. And there are a
number of fascinating cave organisms that we didn't cover in
these episodes. And if you have favorites right in, we'd
love to hear from you, because we could always venture
back into the caves. You know, we don't reside there
all the time, but we go in from time to
time in order to discuss something interesting. All right, as usual,
(47:32):
we'll just remind you that Stuff to Blow Your Mind
is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, listener mail on Mondays, short form
episode on Wednesdays, and on Fridays. We set aside most
serious concerns just talk about a weird film on Weird
House Cinema. Let's see some housekeeping stuff. If you haven't
rated and reviewed the podcast and you have the ability
(47:54):
to do so, where if you get the podcast, that's
a great thing to do. It helps us out. If
you use iTunes or some sort of an Apple podcast
feature to listen to the podcast, make sure you're subscribed
and you're still getting downloads. Let's see social media. We're
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you know, switch whichever one you use. Look us up,
(48:15):
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(48:36):
with other listeners.
Speaker 3 (48:37):
Huge things as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
Have to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
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