‘Male siblings born 44,000 years ago’ were discovered in Yakutia ten meters apart, but the reality is quite different amid aspirations to revive the species.
Some 26000 years ago, Sparta’s mother left her in the cave and went hunting or killed herself, leaving the tiny cub without food.
It was thought that the two cubs were brothers born 44,000 years ago.
Spartak, one of the well-known extinct cave lions, has been discovered to be a female rather than a male and will now need to be renamed Sparta.
It has since been discovered that she was born 18,000 years after Boris, the pup discovered next to her.
A sensational level of pelt and hair preservation is revealed by complete restoration work on the baby cave lions, which were kept superbly in the Siberian permafrost.
Sparta’s mother abandoned her in the cave and went hunting, or she killed herself, leaving the young cub without sustenance about 26000 years ago.
She died of starvation. We questioned why she appeared so thin when she was discovered. Still, tomography of her internal organs revealed no fat, according to scientist Dr. Albert Protopopov, an authority on preserved woolly mammoth bones.
“It was the worst period of starvation,” someone said.
‘She starved to death. We wondered why she looked so skinny when she was found, and then tomography of her internal organs showed no fat.’
The mammoth bone hunter who discovered Boris, a larger cave lion cub, also located Sparta in the Yakutia region the previous year.
Only ten meters separated them.
The initial hypothesis was that the cubs must have come from the same family, but experts now understand that the cubs are 26,000 years apart.
Boris passed away at the age of two to three weeks, approximately 44,000 years ago.
Most likely, his mother abandoned him inside the cave while she went hunting, and when she came back, the tunnel rock collapsed, burying the cub.
He had obvious signs of internal injuries, which Protopopov claimed could have been brought on by a rock falling on him.
According to the researchers, restoring their appearance is the most crucial job of this intricate study on cave lion cubs.
In hundreds of published images of cave lions, they are shown without manes, which remains a mystery. But there are spots and bands of pigmentation there that are not present in lions of the present day. Therefore, we are working to recreate the appearance of the cave bears.
Because cave lions live in a much colder climate than contemporary lions, “their living conditions were very different from modern lions, and we think that is why they had to look different.”
In frigid climates, the prey was less plentiful.
We may be able to determine their social order if we can answer the mane-related question; for instance, we do not know if they organized their pride into alpha males and several females, as do modern lions.
Boris, the older cub, has a severed tail.
The lions are being tested to gather as much data as feasible.
The cave lions were the biggest predators in prehistoric times, second only to bears, and there aren’t many bear skulls to be found near the cave lion skulls.
Because Siberia was then a savanna and bears required more forests, lions ruled the land.
The cave lion cubs are exceptionally well-preserved—you can even make out their whiskers—and we expect to learn much more from them.
Scientists say reproducing cave lions would be much simpler than cloning a mammoth.
Cave and contemporary lions are distinct varieties of the same genus, diverging only 300,000 years ago.
It implies that we can make cave lions using DNA from contemporary African lions.
Compared to the mammoths, it would be much simpler.
But if we can figure out a way to bring woolly mammoths back, that would be a change and a way for humans to atone for their role in the extinction of so many other species.
Dr. Albert Protopopov is an expert in frozen remains from the woolly mammoth era.
The bigger cub, named Boris, is missing his tail.
This led to the theory that he was not a cave lion but an old lynx.
Dr. Protopopov remarked, “We were all concerned about Boris’ absence of a tail.
However, the person who discovered him claimed it was severed when the cub was removed from the ice.
“I understand that there was some concern that the lion cub was a lynx, but we know from the first tests that this was a cave lion cub,” the author said.
The cubs were discovered in the Abyisky neighborhood, 10 meters apart.
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