Stone Age teenager was mauled by a bear 28,000 years ago, skeletal analysis confirms

Nearly 28,000 years ago, a teenage boy was buried with care in a cave in what is now northern Italy, a spectacular shell cap covering his head and a flint blade grasped in his right hand. Archaeologists have now determined his cause of death: a bear attack.

"He probably lost consciousness during the event and never regained it," Vitale Sparacello, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Cagliari in Sardinia, told Live Science in an email. "We know that these people hunted bears and that bears tend to avoid humans whenever they can, but a fortuitous encounter is still possible."

To solve a mystery straight out of CSI: Stone Age, Sparacello and colleagues examined the skeletal remains of the boy — originally excavated from the Arene Candide cave in Liguria in 1942 and nicknamed "Il Principe" (the Prince) — for microscopic clues to his untimely demise. They published their findings in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences in December.

When the Prince was found more than 80 years ago, excavators immediately suspected he had suffered a significant traumatic event around the time of his death because of widespread damage to the bones of his left shoulder area, neck and lower jaw. But no official analysis of the skeleton was ever published, and the Prince's body was reassembled, glued together and put on display in the Ligurian Archaeological Museum shortly after World War II.

Recently, the researchers obtained permission from the museum to remove bones from the display one at a time so that they could look at them under magnification. They also took photographs and made 3D surface models of some of the bones.

After carefully analyzing the images, the researchers concluded that the young teenage forager had suffered massive shoulder and facial trauma around the time of his death, just as the original excavators had suggested. But their analysis also revealed damage that pointed to a bear attack.

One linear mark on the left side of the boy's skull, found underneath the cap of shells, measured 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) long. It occurred around the time of his death, and its shape is consistent with a claw swipe. And on the boy's right ankle, the researchers found a teardrop-shaped depression that also occurred around the time of his death and was made by a cone-shaped object such as a tooth.

"Overall, when considering the nature and pattern of the most obvious lesions, they depict a realistic scenario of fatal mauling by a large carnivore," the researchers wrote in the study. Given the animals commonly found in Late Pleistocene archaeological sites in Italy and the pattern of injuries, the Prince was likely attacked by either a brown bear (Ursus arctos) or the now-extinct cave bear (Ursus spelaeus).

Microscopic evidence of bone healing revealed that the Prince actually survived the initial attack for up to three days. "Given the extent of the bone injuries, it is surprising that this adolescent forager survived even for this brief time," the researchers wrote. The bite or paw smack that smashed his bones "must have fortuitously spared major blood vessels," they wrote, and his "death may have occurred due to secondary brain injury, internal hemorrhage, or multiple organ failure."

Since the boy didn't immediately perish, "most likely the adolescent was not alone because he was cared for immediately," Sparcello said. But we can only speculate about what the group was doing, he said. "It is impossible to say whether they were out hunting or collecting plants."

The Prince is the oldest burial found in the Arene Candide cave. He died around 28,000 to 27,400 years ago and was between 14 and 17 years old. His compatriots buried him on a bed of red ocher with a headdress made from hundreds of perforated shells and deer teeth, along with several ivory pendants and a blade made of flint imported from southern France. A large lump of yellow ocher was placed in the area between his damaged shoulder, neck and jaw.

Although ancient hunter-gatherers were undoubtedly aware of potentially dangerous animals, the Prince's prolonged agony after the violent attack may have rocked his small community. "The rich formal burial accorded to the Principe may reflect a need to ritually sanction an exceptionally negative event," the researchers wrote.

The team hopes to continue its research on the Prince. "It is possible that in the future we will do an amelogenin test on the dental enamel [to determine biological sex] or a full genetic study, but destructive analysis has to be done sparingly on these exceptional remains," Sparcello said.

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