T h e   M a m m o t h   F a u n a .
 Cave bear.
 
In Siberia the bear for his huge sizes, force and mind is named as “the owner of   taiga ”. It is interesting how our far ancestors have named the gigantic cave bear. He was really giant. If the large brown bear weighs 300-350 kgs, than the cave bear weighed 800-900 kgs. Only his head length was more than 0,5 m. And what the head: long as pincers, massive jaw with huge prominante tusks, high convex forehead and small eyes, half-closed by a brown wool. And if to add this portrait with wide chest, powerful paws with long claws, then the picture is horrifying.
  However cave bear was not so terrible as this portrait . He was not at all furious predator. The cave bear was the quiet, sluggish and unagressive herbivorous giant. He ate the radicals and berries, enjoyed by insects, and sometimes, if it was possible, caught a fish in the rivers. Only great hunger could force him to attack an animal or a human. And at that anyone could run away from such quieter.
  The ancient bears liked to settle in caves. Here they found safe places for winter sleeping. But the life in caves for bears was not easy. Known Russian palaeontologist, professor N. K. Vereschagin, wrote: “ In crude caves, on a cold linestones animals caught a cold, were sick of rheumatism ”. In dark slippery corridors animals sometimes fell into natural snares, narrow crevices and deep wells with vertical walls, whence they could not get out. Sometimes in spring the streams of thawed water filled the caves, and bears sank not awaked from winter hibernation.
  And the bear had the dangerous two-legged enemy - a Human. About 80 thousand years ago neanderthalens hunted for a sluggish cave bear. The Human expelled a bear from a cave to put up there itself. Meat and fat of bears are useful and nutritious, a Human used thick skins of bears as a clothes and a bed. The cave giant was powerless before the people armed acute spears and fire. 

 

Cave bear.
Head width was
0,5 meters, weight -
800-900 kg.
"Bear" cave with bears skulls in
Hakassia.
Reconstructed cave bear skeleton.

 
  There were some kinds of cave bears in the Ice Age, and not everyone were large. For example, in caves of Ural and Southern Siberia the small bears settled, whose sizes sometimes were even less then the modern bear has. They weighed only 120-150 kgs.
  The cave bear is not an ancestor for the modern bear , he is only it’s relative on a side line. Already in the Ice Age the cave bears were a weak deadlock branch in the bear’s set . Their extinction became the natural evolution rezult of these peaceful animals, poorly adapted to new conditions.