Someone stabbed a cave bear in the head with a spear 35,000 years ago

But while cleaning one cave bear skull from Imanay, Dmitry Gimranov of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences and his colleagues noticed a rather suspicious hole in the parietal bone, near the back of the skull.The lower edge of the hole is a gentle curve with a flattened base, while the upper edge is more uneven and widens sharply in the middle. "The described features of the hole indicate its obvious artificial origin in a very strong impact with a hard object."If Gimranov and his colleagues are correct, that could mean that a person killed at least one of the 110 dead small cave bears in Imanay Cave.That’s not as surprising as it sounds—there’s some evidence of people killing and even butchering other bear species, like large cave bears and brown bears, during the Pleistocene. For instance, archaeologists have found the bones of about two dozen large cave bears at sites scattered across Eurasia; many have the telltale cut-and-scrape marks of defleshing, and one even has the tip of a stone projectile still lodged in a vertebra.Of course, that’s a few dozen out of literally millions of bear bones unearthed at Pleistocene sites across Europe and western Asia. If Gimranov and his colleagues are right about the Imanay Cave bear skull, at least one Pleistocene hunter had one heck of a bear story to tell.Unfortunately, we can't learn the really exciting details of that story, but here’s what we can piece together from the available evidence: radiocarbon dating material from the bone reveals that the encounter happened roughly 35,000 years ago.