The cave lion, Panthera spelaea, was a big cat closely related to the modern lion but genetically a separate species. From about 300 000 to 13 000 years ago it ranged across the mammoth steppe, from western Europe through Siberia and over the Bering land bridge into Alaska and the Yukon. It was one of the main predators of that world, and a skeleton from Germany has been called the earliest direct evidence of people killing a large predator. Its name is a historical accident: it describes where the bones turned up, not where the animal lived.
Named after the wrong place
Goldfuss named the species in 1810 from a skull found in the Zoolithenhöhle, a cave in Bavaria, and many more bones have come out of caves since. Yet the lion probably used caves only rarely, if at all, and it also lived in regions that have none. Its home was steppe and grassland, with some open woodland.
The bones got underground in other ways. Hyenas seem to have dragged in lions killed in fights over carcasses. Weak or sick adults may have died after going into caves to hunt hibernating bears or steal food from hyenas.
Chemical traces in bones from Europe and eastern Beringia show that reindeer were especially important prey. A frozen steppe bison from Alaska, Blue Babe, has bite marks of the right size and a fragment of lion tooth in its hide.
From giant to dwarf
Some early members of the lineage, often split off as Panthera fossilis, are estimated at 2.5 to 2.9 m long and 400 to 500 kg, among the largest cats that ever lived. Late Pleistocene lions were smaller, at 2 to 2.1 m long, and they kept shrinking. A 2024 paper by Marciszak and Gornig describes a gradual decline that sped up late in the last glaciation. The final populations are put at only 70 to 90 kg and 70 to 75 cm at the shoulder, the size of small modern lions, which may have left them more exposed to wolves.
Frozen cubs and a missing mane
Two cubs from the Semyuelyakh River in Yakutia, a female named Sparta and a male named Boris, were 1 to 2 months old when they died. They lay close together but were not littermates: their uncalibrated radiocarbon ages are about 28 000 and 43 400 years. Sparta’s fur is greyish to light brown and Boris’s a lighter greyish yellow, which led the authors to suggest that coats grew paler with age and suited snowy country. Hair from an adult found by the Malyi Anyui River in Chukotka is similar to a modern lion’s but slightly lighter, over a very thick undercoat.
For the mane, the evidence is art. A drawing in Chauvet Cave shows two lions walking together, and the larger, drawn with a scrotum, has no mane. Whether they lived in prides is unresolved. Guthrie argued from the missing manes for solitary animals or small family groups, Yamaguchi and colleagues rejected that reasoning, and a 2024 paper by Sabol and Puzachenko called the question open.
Spears and carvings
The Siegsdorf skeleton in Germany, about 48 000 years old, is an old male of medium size. A 2023 study led by Russo concluded from a puncture in a rib that it was killed with a wooden thrusting spear, probably by Neanderthals, and cut marks show it was butchered. Toe bones at least 190 000 years old from Einhornhöhle suggest a lion skin carried into the cave, and at Scladina in Belgium, about 130 000 years ago, Neanderthals made tools from a lion’s shin bone. Modern humans later painted lions at Chauvet and Lascaux and carved the lion-headed figure of Hohlenstein-Stadel, 41 000 to 35 000 years old.
Separate lineage, shared end
A 2026 study of 12 genomes led by Stanton confirmed that cave and modern lions were distinct lineages, with some ancient gene flow. Sun and colleagues reported in 2026 that every Japanese “tiger” fossil yielding molecular data was in fact a cave lion.
From 111 radiocarbon dates, Stuart and Lister placed the extinction at about 14 000 to 14 500 years ago in Eurasia and about a thousand years later in Alaska and the Yukon. Russo’s paper mentions fossils about 12 500 years old in Central Europe. Stuart and Lister linked the end to a warming about 14 700 years ago that spread shrubs and trees over open ground, with falling prey numbers possibly contributing. The role of people remains unclear.
