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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday, so we have a vault episode for you. This is going to be part four of our series, part four of four, titled Life in the Hypogean World. We're going to wrap this one up today, so let's dive right in. This originally published 3-14-20-24. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And we're back with the fourth and final part of our series on cave biology and cave environments. If you haven't listened to the other parts already, this will probably be a richer experience if you go back and check those out first. In the previous parts, we talked about some of the common characteristics of cave environments, especially as they pertain to the life forms that might inhabit them.
caves. We talked about the different types of organisms you find in caves, the ones that are fully cave adapted versus the ones that are only visitors. We talked about cave adapted organisms such as the blind Mexican cave fish, also known as the Mexican tetra, the ohm, which is a type of cave salamander found in the Dynaric Alps,
We talked about bat guano. We talked about snakes that hide in caves and attack bats as they come and go. We got into a lot of great stuff. And today we're here to round out the series. Yeah, with a lot of like a lot of our multi-part episodes, it's kind of like the first episode is kind of like a lot of the initial information you need. And then the second episode, this is where you find some of the core stuff that attracted us to the topic to begin with.
Part three, we kind of like fill in with a little more data, some other interesting entries in said series. In the fourth episode or whatever the final episode happens to be, generally that's where it's like, what's left? What's the thing that came up in our research that we didn't know we were going to be excited about? Or in some cases, maybe what's the weird tangential connection that also came up or we found ourselves drifting into in our journey?
Oh, I think that's a good way to characterize it. So what have you got, Rob? Well, I mentioned this earlier. I forget which of the earlier episodes, but I mentioned the extinct cave bear in passing.
And I would just kind of I kept touching back in on the subject as we were working on the other episodes. And finally, I was like, yeah, we need to go in a little deeper and talk about what is ultimately like a really fascinating organism. There have been disagreements and mysteries regarding it. And it is an organism that, while no longer with us, does overlap with our ancestors. You know, it was an ice age creature.
I included here for you, Joe, a reconstruction, an image of what one of these bears would have looked like, potentially. And in a bit, I'll get into, like, what are some of the main anatomical features. But just looking at it, you can tell this is a very huge bear. If...
It doesn't look that different from, say, like a large grizzly bear or brown bear of some sort. Coloration is brownish, but one might notice that the head is enormous. It has a much bigger head than one might expect, certainly on an extant bear.
Yeah, it looks a lot like a grizzly, though. I'm no bear expert. It does appear to me in this reconstruction to have a somewhat shorter snout and the sort of boxier head. Boxier and I'm to understand would have been would have would have appeared wider as well.
So we're talking about Ursus spileus. It's a member of the Ursus genus alongside the brown bear, which includes the grizzly subspecies, among others, the polar bear, the American black bear and the Asian black bear.
That means it's naturally a member of the larger Ursidae family, which also includes the likes of giant pandas, short-faced bears, and others. Oh, I didn't realize pandas were technically in that family. Yeah, yeah. Like one of the interesting things about pandas is that pandas are herbivores for the most part.
But they still have a carnivore's digestive system and they still have like carnivore genes. So they're pretty fascinating in their own right. You know, it's easy to overlook how interesting pandas are, especially if you go to a zoo and you see one in captivity that is probably not doing much other than sleeping or eating bamboo.
The last time I went to a zoo, the thing I saw that filled me with the most joy was actually vicarious joy through a panda. When I saw the, uh, the feeders through some new bamboo into the enclosure and the panda went up to the pile of bamboo and literally just flopped in it, just flopped down in its food. Like, ah, give it to me. It is literally their favorite thing. Yeah. Rolling around in it. More on this connection to the panda in a minute, in a minute here. But, um,
The cave bear went extinct. I do want to highlight that the exact timing for this depends on exactly what sources and what evidence you're looking at. I've seen between 28,000 and 27,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum. I've seen 24,000 years ago. And in some sources, some of the older sources, you also see 15,000 years ago cited as an extinction point.
But I believe an earlier point in 28, 27, maybe 24 is generally favored by scientists today. That's generally the range, the broader range in which I'm tending to see the numbers and the sources I was looking at. And the interesting thing about the cave bear, too, is that this animal is a recent enough denizen of the planet that we have been able to study its soft tissue in addition to its bones. And it's actual, you know, we can be able to study like the chemical composition of its bones, etc.
There was even a frozen specimen discovered in 2020, I believe, and we've been able to sequence its genome. So we're able to learn a fair amount about what they were and what they did, though certain mysteries remain about their exact lifestyles, their interactions with other organisms and so forth.
Well, let's come back to the cave theme, right? Because that's the umbrella under which we're discussing the cave bear here. We're, of course, not talking about an obligate cave dweller. This is not a blind, hairless bear living in the depths. I'm suddenly realizing, as interesting as that might be, I'm assuming some...
Fantasy Weaver has done something like that before. But no, this would have at best been a troglophilic creature. OK, so the troglophilic creature enjoys visiting caves. It may visit caves for a number of reasons, but it doesn't live there permanently and it's not biologically adapted to full time life in the caves. Yeah, like it's not just hanging out in there all the time eating bats or anything.
But, you know, the cave moniker can be confusing with a lot of these species because, of course, we speak of cavemen, either in terms of prehistoric Homo sapiens or Neanderthals, though even with the latter, who certainly did utilize cave environments, as did humans, they used open air sites for various activities as well, it seems. So it's not like they just lived in caves or or and they're certainly not creatures that that were obligate cave dwellers.
Plus, the cave moniker sometimes has as much to do, if not more to do, with the places where we've discovered the remains, because as we've touched on before, I think in this series and probably in general, like caves are a great place to.
for remains to be preserved to some degree. I saw a paper that was quoting an expert on cave bears. It was like the bears slept in caves and they had the good fortune to die in them or something to that effect. You know, they're like, fortunately for us, they died in caves a lot. And so we have a lot of remains to look at.
But anyway, just because we have come to refer to a creature as a cave animal, it doesn't necessarily mean that it lived in caves. The main example of this era would be the cave lion or Panthera spilea, also known as the step lion, which is now understood to have largely lived in open areas and possibly woodlands. But we know them a lot. We know a lot about them from skeletal remains found in caves, thus cave lions.
But it's not thought that that's where they spent a huge amount of their time. It's more just like we happen to have gotten some remains from caves. That's right. Yeah. I mean, their remains found in caves are apparently best understood as, on one hand, perhaps the accumulations or middens of extinct cave hyenas.
These these this was this is also known as the Ice Age spotted hyena that would have scavenged carcasses and brought them back to the caves where they lived or at least the cave openings where they live. These would have been this is an example of something that did live in caves based on our current understanding. And so they would have hoarded, scavenged and killed prey in such places while also competing apparently with Neanderthals for some of the same cave environments.
Oh, interesting. But back to the cave lion, it is also thought that they might have ventured into caves during the winter, especially in search of hibernating bears that might in some cases be easier to pick off, especially if they were desperate for the food. And they also may have periodically entered caves in order to steal food away from cave hyenas.
Though, to be sure, it seems like they largely preyed on larger wild herbivores like the wild horse and the bison. Mm-hmm.
Either way, cave lions wound up in caves and cave environments help preserve their bones for future excavation by humans who at least at first were like, oh, this is a cave lion. We found it in a cave. But I assume you're saying that researchers do not believe the same kind of naming error was made with cave bears. The cave bears really do seem largely involved with caves. Yes, yes. That's the consensus there.
So, you know, what were cave bears? We talked a little bit about what they look like already. They were very large bears, comparable to or even larger than any of the bears we know today. Even the mighty polar bears and Kodiak bears, which, depending on who you're talking to, these are kind of like the two extant species of bears that are often held up as the biggest. Mm-hmm.
So male cave bears could range in weight. One estimate I saw was 350 to 600 kilograms or 770 to 1,320 pounds. I've also seen like the 400 to 1,000 kilogram estimate, about 880 to 2,200 pounds. Again, it's going to vary. The males are bigger than the females and so forth. But anyway, you cut it.
Big bears, big, heavy bears. Their weight would have fluctuated depending on where they were seasonally, where their diet was, what the overall climate happened to be. But yes, these were very large bears. And therefore, as you can imagine, not just any cave is going to do. Cave has to be large enough to hold a bear. ♪
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Now, speaking of these caves, I was reading about them a little bit. I was looking at a few different sources, but I've had this book on my shelf for years and I hadn't really cracked it open, but it's by one Wolf D. Storl titled Bear, Myth, Animal and Icon.
This author, by the way, I think he's generally more considered an anthropologist and an ethnobotanist. And I'm to understand his views have ventured into some areas that may be considered more esoteric and even controversial. But I don't think any of that applies to this work.
Okay. Anyway, the author here points to another connection, kind of similar to something we discussed, I believe, in the last episode with the om, a connection between an actual cave organism and traditions concerning the dragon. Okay.
There's a cave in Austria known as Drachenhole or Dragon's Hole, so named because the copious amounts of cave bear bones in there were apparently interpreted during the Middle Ages as the bones of dragons. The cave is located near a place called Mixnitz and is associated with the legend of the dragon slayer of Mixnitz.
I was looking around. I couldn't find what felt like a definitive analysis or retelling of this legend. But I saw some write-ups where it seems like it's, you know, on one level, your typical tale of a dragon slayer. But it did seem, based on the one telling I found, that the dragon slayer here uses an ingenious trap rather than overt combat to kill the dragon. Like it has to do with like sharpened spikes.
and left out to gouge into the dragon's flesh and then it goes off and dies, that sort of thing. Kind of your predator model of overcoming your foe. Oh, that's my kind of tale. I always love a monster trap. Yeah.
So you're probably wondering, okay, this cave is full of cave bear bones. How many bones are we talking about? You know, we're talking about like two or three individuals, maybe a dozen individuals, you know, maybe a dusty old set of cave bones near one corner, a skull in the other. No, no, no. We're talking about the bones of an estimated 30,000 cave bears. 30,000. Wow. Yeah.
Other bones were apparently also found in this particular cave, including those of the cave lion, apparently. But we're mostly talking about cave bears here and in quite an abundance. You have to think how long they would have been accumulating there for this unbelievable amount.
Yeah, yeah. Like we would we would be dealing with a situation here where the bears lived in these caves, hibernated in these caves and died in these caves for thousands and thousands of years. So like recent genetic data apparently indicates that cave bear populations in Europe, specifically along the Danube River, were stable for a good hundred thousand years or more. So, yeah, you're dealing with with lots of bears living and dying in these locations. That is incredible.
Now, the caves, specifically this Austrian cave system, was apparently excavated during the 19th century because the soil found inside of these caves was rich in bones and bear manure that had accumulated over these vast periods of time. And they proved usable as phosphate fertilizer. And there was a shortage during this time period there.
Storl writes that 60 trains with 50 cars each were filled with the stuff and also points out that a cave near Velberg, Germany, was also excavated for its cave bear riches during this time period.
Now, these aren't the only two European caves that there's evidence of a lot of cave bear activity. I read in passing examples of caves in, for instance, Spain and Romania that also provided a great deal of cave bear remains. Now, speaking to their death in these caves, because, you know, it's one thing to...
to sleep in the cave. And there is evidence, we'll get to that in a second, there is evidence already of like the bears having lived in and slept in the caves, but they also died there. And I've read that it's thought that cave bears may have frequently died during hibernation, especially during particularly trying time periods, which we'll get to here. Because if an individual couldn't put on enough weight heading into winter and or environmental conditions were particularly dire,
they just might not emerge again in the spring. Plus, we already mentioned that in some cases you might have predators venturing into those caves to try and find an easy bear to pick off. And it's an easy mathematics to imagine like, okay, if you have a weakened bear in a hibernation state, one that might not be surviving the winter anyway, like that's ideal biomass to pick off.
Now, I think everyone's familiar enough with the fat bear week craze these days to know, yeah, that bears have to pack it on.
And and when we find some sport and amusement in figuring out like which bears are packing on the most and what do extant bears eat in order to go into hibernation? Well, the answer is, what do you got? They're omnivores. Anything is on the table, right? Yeah, I think a lot of the ones that we're familiar with are these ones photographed in Alaska. From what I understand, they're probably going to be eating a lot of like river fish, like salmon. Yeah, yeah.
The cave bears, though, this would have been a different matter. So research has differed at different times on whether the bears were strictly herbivores or if they were mostly herbivores. At the very least, they seem to have depended far more on the consumption of plant matter than pretty much any extant bear, with the obvious exception of the giant panda. These cave bears would have gone out and eaten a lot of vegetation. And we see that reflected in just their anatomy.
So I was looking at the work of Alejandro Perez Ramos at the University of Malaga in Spain. This would have been a 2020 study. The researcher here points out that the cave bears were built in such a way, their skulls were built in such a way that they could only chew with their back teeth. So extant bears, the bears we have today, can chew with the front as well as
as the back and therefore have the correct dental build to eat vegetation or meat, switching back and forth between the two, depending on what's available. You know, so if there are a lot of fish on hand, bam, the bear, you know, bears like grizzlies and so forth, they're good to go. Get in there and eat that meat. Dead whale, likewise, get in there, scavenge some of that meat. Oh, what's this? You only have berries or oh,
somebody left the door open to their house, you know, they can make do with what's available. But again, not the case with cave bears. Chemical analysis of cave bear bones has also revealed a mostly plant-based diet. So the cave bear had evolved to a point at which there was no going back in a swift manner anyway, such as the demands brought on by sudden changes in climate. And this would seem to be
A major, major factor in their extinction, if not the major factor in their extinction. And this seems to be the answer that most of the current research is pointing to. But it also reveals some other interesting things about them, you know, the build of their skull here, because they also had much larger sinuses in exchange for that lack of robust front teeth.
And this is interesting, especially because extant bears are already famous super smellers. I think if you've ever ventured into bear territory, you have been warned, you know, don't leave, say, chapstick in your car because a bear can smell that and a bear will want to come see what kind of smell.
sweet, delicious, fruity food you have hidden away inside of your automobile. Oh, I just imagining the bears going wild over like the synthetic kinds of fruity flavors that you get in all these products. Like, oh, what is funberry? I must discover. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's this is again, something we've touched on already in this series, you know, like how how difficult or impossible it is for human beings to
really put themselves in the sense world of another organism that has a sense array different from our own. And smell is another one of those areas. So take, for instance, a bloodhound, a canine. Canines in general, but specifically something like a bloodhound, is already pretty famous for being a super smeller. That is, just dogs in general, their sense of smell is just a different part of their being.
You know, you see that when you see a dog like riding around with its human in a vehicle and it has its head out the window. Right. It's like it's it's like it's it's unlike all the psychedelics at that moment. Yeah.
And yet I've seen it estimated that a bear and again, not a cave bear, just bears in general bears we have today. I've read that their sense of smell is seven times better than a bloodhound. And that that would mean that their sense of smell is thousands of times more powerful than a human beings.
And yet the cave bear likely had an even keener sense of smell, if we can even imagine such a thing. Likely great hearing as well, but on the other hand, reduced eyesight and a smaller brain than you might expect with such a large head. And I'm suspecting here that, you know, that would also have to do with its mode of life at this point in its evolution, like it is now.
It's just going around eating as much vegetation as it can, sifting through these various sources of vegetation, but maybe not having to be as clever and opportunistic as a true omnivore would be.
But anyway, all of this would seem to be wound up in their extinction as well, because somewhere around 24,000 years ago, around the time when their age ended, the age of the cave bear comes to an end, temperatures plummeted. This would have been the last glacial maximum period. Cooler temps meant less time and less plant matter to bulk up on before going into hibernation. So the cave bears likely couldn't keep up. They couldn't bulk up.
And again, could not adjust their diet like other bear species. So the bear species that survived these cold times were the ones that could diversify, that could go in more on the meat perhaps than they had been. And in many cases, yeah, this would mean that you would have cave bears crawling into their caves to hibernate with or without young and simply never getting back up again.
I alluded to this earlier, but in the caves that they called home, we do have more than just their bones to speak of them. So they, like a lot of animals, they ended up leaving claw marks on the walls in some cases. And they also dug shallow depressions in the floor, likely as places to sleep. And you can find images of these from various European cave systems. You know, they're not especially flashy, but it's this sort of large bear-shaped indention in the ground.
And many of these remain to this day. And some of those claw marks, by the way, would later be incorporated into the cave art of Homo sapiens. Oh, interesting. Like you mean like that humans made their art around pre-existing claw marks in the walls and like made that part of the art? Yeah, yeah. Like I believe that's the case with some of the art in France's Chauvet caves, where you have depictions of cave bears, but also evidence of cave bears, including claw marks.
Now, speaking of humans, there, of course, has long been some mystery over exactly what sort of relationships the Andertals and Homo sapiens had with the cave bears. I mean, we're humans. We can't help it. We find out that we were alive at all during the same time period. We're like, well, what about us? How do we factor into this fascinating and majestic scenario? What were we doing?
And did we ride them? Did we ride them? Did we worship them? Yeah, there was this much popularized idea that early humans worshiped cave bears. And it does seem like there's some potential evidence for this, but apparently this has long been disputed and sort of largely pushed out of the way. This would have been the basis for fictional works like the novel Clan of the Cave Bear. But there's still various mysteries along these lines. You know, they will never know 100 percent what
our ancient, ancient ancestors really thought about these creatures. And it's also easy to simplify what we thought about them. That like, oh, did we worship them or did we eat them or did we run from them? And of course, you know, even our prehistoric ancestors, I think, would have had the mental complexity to do all three on where you are in a given day and so forth.
I think it's been years now, but I have a memory of coming across some interesting claims on the internet about...
about like, you know, prehistoric humans and their specific beliefs regarding bears. And I was like, well, what's the source of this? Like, what's the evidence for it? And I could never actually track it down. Like, it seems like there are just a lot of claims floating around on the internet about prehistoric humans and bears. Yeah, I mean, I guess on one level, it's like we do acknowledge the fact that human, ancient humans, um,
and prehistoric humans, they acknowledged these large creatures in their natural world. They had relationships with various creatures in their natural world, and they seemed to have superstitious and or mythological ideas about them. We talked about
some of the earliest images and past episodes of the show where these people would combine human and animal imagery into a single entity, though exactly what is meant by that, we're not sure. Yeah, this actually came up in a listener mail I did while you were out recently. A listener wrote in about our episode on the Loewenmensch, this carving that has been interpreted as depicting a sort of a human body with a lion's head.
Though there's some dispute about whether that's the correct interpretation of what it's supposed to be, but that seems like a common interpretation. And so, yeah, this raised these interesting questions about like, when did we start forming ideas about creatures that did not exist in nature? Yeah, it is hard for us to figure out the exact artistic intent.
For example, going back to the Chauvet Cave in France, this is a cave that contains human illustrations of cave bears, among other animals, copious amounts of cave bear bones, cave bear claw marks on the walls. It has floor depressions made by the bears.
But one chamber here also apparently has a single cave bear skull that seemed to have been placed on a stone slab in the center of the chamber. But it's it's impossible to say why this is the case. Like, were they worshiping the bear or a particular bear or.
Was it just a curiosity? Was it some form of superstition or what? You know, did it did it represent some like tangible connection between these people and their way of life to the bear? Or was it something more abstract?
Now, apparently we do know from some skeletal evidence, this would be in rare cases, some evidence of butchery. And also there may have been another example that was more directly tied to some sort of like hunting weapon, but at least butchery evidence that shows that humans at least sometimes hunted or killed or at least butchered cave bears.
But as pointed out in Andrew Curry's 2010 Fate of the Cave Bear article for Smithsonian.com, citing anthropologist Eric Trinkaus, it's unlikely that human hunting impacted the cave bear's existence or led to its extinction.
Humans, Trincaos points out, face many lethal threats during this time. And the cave bear, if provoked, was certainly one of them. I mean, just because it doesn't really eat meat doesn't mean that an animal this big and this ferocious could not kill you. So it's unlikely, according to this expert, that humans tangled with it all that much.
But they might have sometimes gone after hibernating bears or hunted them in other isolated events for one reason or another. So it happened, but probably not all that often. Still, there's again, there's a lot of room for.
some level of supernatural consideration of the Cape bear. Going back to the work of Wolf Storl in his book, he writes that surely, quote, any animal that can go in and out of the womb of the great goddess without incident is surely also a guardian of fertility and birth. Again, he's predominantly an anthropologist and an ethnobotanist. So this is the book in its entirety is more about
how we have thought about bears throughout history, even getting into at least short entries on Ewoks and Fozzie Bear later on. But particularly, he points to other traditions along these lines of a female bear shaman character, a lady of the caves, and also reflects on up to traditions of the ancient Greek goddess Artemis, whose domain includes both the hunt and childbirth and is also associated with bears.
Interesting. But of course, we just get increasingly into the domain of speculation in this. Again, I think most experts kind of dismiss the notion that early Homo sapiens worshipped the cave bear to any significant degree. By dismissed, I assume you mean not that they rule it out, but they just say we don't have super strong evidence. Yeah, that's what I get from it. Because I think it would be silly to say,
you know, our ancestors didn't notice these things at all or they didn't care about. Like, it seems like there's room for there to be that connection, but do we have the evidence of it? Yeah, it's just one of those mysteries. There's a lot about the culture of prehistoric humans that's difficult to know based on the evidence we have. Yeah. Real quick in passing before we move on to more important matters, I will say that Storl has one entry, actually a whole page in the book on gummy bears. Yeah.
Also apparently known as dancing bears, which apparently have Germanic origins going back to 1922 and are, quote, now part of the German way of life. OK, he doesn't get into this issue in this 2018 book.
But I wonder what he would make of the increasing use of bear-shaped gummies as a delivery system for CBD and cannabis and cannabis-related products. And even before this, I think going back to the 90s, they were being used in some cases to deliver vitamins. And today you can get all manner of supplements in them. So like the dancing bear kind of becomes this shamanistic item, perhaps once more, you know. That's funny. But no real connection to the cave bear there. Sorry.
What would you make also about the equivalency of worms there and the fact that the gummy worms are typically larger than the bears? That suggests something about Shia Lude to me. Ah, yes. Solid point. For some reason, I've gotten to the point where I accept that a bear-shaped gummy is an appropriate shape for some sort of chemical delivery system, as opposed to
Some of the other shapes like for some reason a worm is too silly for me. Yeah, like it just seems like why what are you doing? It's ridiculous. It's irresponsible Kids eat candy worms, but but bears bears. I don't know like are we at the point where I Just you know, we don't I guess we don't go through a lot of gummy bears But it just it's like I would be suspicious of a gummy bear. I'd be like be careful. You don't know what's in that bear and
But a pure gummy worm, you're saying you're more likely to trust that. I guess, but now I'm second-guessing myself. I don't know. I'm just suspicious of the whole gummy genre. ♪
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Okay, well, I've got one more thing I want to talk about. So we've discussed the ways that animals adapt to cave environments, but I wanted to talk about a fascinating idea I came across in a speleology paper, which is wildflowers.
What if some of the natural holes and recessions in rock that we call caves were actually formed in part not by standard inorganic processes like, you know, lava tube solidification in volcanic rock or the dissolution of limestone by water, but
Instead, were formed in part by animals essentially eating their way through the rock. Let's look at a paper. So my source here is by Charles A. Lundquist and William W. Varnadoe Jr. called Salt Ingestion Caves, published in the International Journal of Speleology in the year 2006.
So the authors kick things off by pointing out that, of course, animals need salt to survive. It is a basic requirement in the body. Regular table salt is known chemically as sodium chloride. And when we ingest it,
Our bodies use both the sodium ions and the chloride ions from that molecule for a number of functions. Salt is necessary for our muscles to function properly, like we need sodium so muscles can contract and relax. It's used in our nervous systems to conduct impulses. It's used for all kinds of things throughout the body.
And most humans get way more of it than we need because we add supplemental salt to our food for taste. But of course, wild animals don't have the kind of ready access to supplemental salt that we do. In the wild, carnivores can usually get
the salt they need by eating the flesh of other animals, which naturally contains a good bit of it. But for herbivores, getting enough salt can be difficult. The sodium content of most terrestrial plants is quite low. And since ancient times, humans have noticed that animals, especially herbivores, sometimes gather at what are called
salt licks or more broadly, mineral licks, places where there are rocks or soils that animals can consume in some way to supplement the mineral content of their diet, including minerals such as sodium salt.
This can include a range of behaviors in the wild, like licking salty rocks on a mountainside, eating exposed clays or other sediments that have a desirable mineral content. And because herbivores are drawn to these salty rocks and soils, hunters have long known about them as good places to find game. So what does this have to do with caves? Well, the authors write, quote,
Quote,
These cavities that humans can enter can have the characteristics of a cave as defined locally. So that last sentence meaning that, you know, whatever people call a cave, you know, that varies from place to place. But usually it means like a void in the rock that's large enough for a person to go into to enter. And those types of voids can indeed be created by animals removing the rock by eating it.
Wow. So you're saying that in some cases, a cave is naturally formed over geologic time by rainwater and so forth. Other times, a deer just licks it until it's right. A deer licked it into the side of a mountain. That appears to be the case, according to these authors. So they look at several case studies in the paper. One is a site referenced in some literature about the Altai Mountains in Asia, which
The authors are talking about reports from surveys of the Altai Mountains, specifically of a mountain bearing shale formations near the confluence of the Khan River and the Charch River. Apparently, the shale here is very salty, and they quote a commentary by an author named Carl Friedrich von Ledebohr from 1826 saying,
who writes of the shale, Of course, a grotto refers to a small cave.
And this author mentions that both domestic and wild animals come to this mountain to eat the shale. Another example they mention is a place in the United States. It's called Rock House Cave. It's a cave situated within the rock of a small bluff in the U.S. state of Mississippi. They say that the entrance is roughly 10 feet wide, but then the cave actually widens once you go inside. It roughly doubles in width.
It's just about tall enough for an adult to stand up, and it reaches about 15 feet deep into the bluff. And they say the surrounding rock is mostly what the authors characterize as a soft, fine-grained sandstone. They say it is of the Catabula Formation.
And it's got a significant amount of sodium chloride in it. The authors also say there's no evidence that water solution caused the formation of this cave. And instead, it appears that it was caused by many generations of animals removing the walls by licking. They say there is a rough surface on the walls that seems to quite possibly have been created just by animals licking it away over time. They say it was probably first watered.
wild deer and possibly bison that opened this cave up and then maybe cattle later. Oh, wow. But the most amazing example they cite is one from Eastern Africa, which
So there's an extinct volcano on the border between Kenya and Uganda. This volcano is called Mount Elgon or El Ghani. And on the side of this mountain, there are what I've read described elsewhere as ballroom-sized caves, large sizable caves that appear to have been, at least in part, excavated by elephants. Elephants inside caves? Yes, yes.
So there is some question about the role of the elephants in creating the caves, but there is no question that the elephants do go into the caves and consume rocks. That has been directly observed. That's the thing that happens. So the most famous of the Mount Elgon caves is known as Kituum Cave, K-I-T-U-M.
And the authors propose that these caves were formed in part by water solution, but also in part because wild herbivores literally eat the rocks away and remove them from the caverns.
Yeah, this is amazing. I have actually seen footage of this. I don't remember which elephant documentary I saw this in, probably maybe more than one. I watched a lot of elephant documentaries at one point in my son's upbringing when he was super into elephants. But it is amazing to behold. And these are large caves, you know,
For starters, elephants have to fit in them. But yeah, I think ballroom seems appropriate based on the footage as I remember it, because these look like the kind of caverns that you might have filmed like a B movie in or perhaps an episode of Star Trek took place in.
Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Now, elephants are not the only animals that go into these caves to eat the to like consume parts of the walls and eat the rocks. Apparently also buffaloes, antelopes and sometimes monkeys have been observed to go into the caves and eat some of the some of the soft rocks that line the walls.
The authors say specifically Katoom Cave, to give you a better idea about the size of one of the big caves here, they say that the rock face that the elephants generally go to to get their minerals from is about 160 meters into the mountain from the entrance. So that's a deep cave.
And they say that what happens is the elephants go in and they usually loosen pieces of rock from the walls of the cave with their tusks. So they're like digging against the walls with their tusks. These pieces fall to the floor and then they pick up the pieces with their trunks and then they put the piece in their mouth and chew it up, crush it with their teeth. Now, what was not fully resolved at the time of this paper and from what I can tell has still not been fully resolved is
What are the relative contributions of the different processes to how large the caves are? Like, are the caves predominantly formed by inorganic solution and erosion of the rock by water flow? And then supplemented, is that excavation supplemented by elephants and other animals removing some amount of rock?
Or are the elephants and other animals primarily responsible for hollowing out the caves and there's just some solution by water going on? Also, what role may have been played by like human mining and other factors?
So the authors look at several analyses of this and they quote one researcher named Ian Redmond, who did a study of the cave in 1984. Redmond did several months of field observations, watching the elephants and analyzing even the mineral content of their droppings. Redmond wrote, quote,
Wow.
Yeah, amazing to consider. The author is also they cite another study, this one by researchers named Donald McFarlane and Joyce Lundberg. This was from 2004.
where after field observations, these researchers suggested a multi-step process for cave formation that would go like this. They summarize it as follows. So first of all, there is a cliff that forms. There's like water flowing off of the mountain. They say off of a cap rock layer.
And it erodes some material from underneath. Then after that, they say that some more material, clay-sized material, sediment, is removed from the floor of the cave by groundwater sapping. And then they also say more mass is removed from the cave by animal excavation.
And then at some point there are collapses within the cave. They write, quote, collapse of overlying beds makes piles of broken material which are removed by action of water and animal geophagy rock eating.
And then finally, they say step four is repeat. This whole process repeats over and over again. So they're saying it's a combination of material being removed by water flow and then the cavern collapsing as material is removed and supporting walls are removed. And then animals also remove parts of the walls and remove some of the collapsed material from above. And it just keeps going on like that.
Because those animals, they don't care about the structural integrity of the cave. They just want to get that salt. Right. All they want is their fix. Now, ultimately, the authors of this analysis, McFarlane and Lundberg, were unable to say what the relative masses of rock removed by water versus geophagy were. But they seem to believe that the amount removed by by the animals was significant. And then coming back to the parent paper, the one by Lundquist and Varnadoe Jr.,
They bring up something that was interesting when I was thinking about it in parallel to our discussion of bat guano as a kind of alternative sunlight or base of the food chain in deeper limestone caves. Speaking of the Mount Elgin caves, the authors here note that, quote, a common feature in most of the larger caves is the quantity of dung deposited by beasts which have come to the caves from time immemorial to lick or otherwise consume the agglomerate walls.
Traces of elephants using the caves are most common and their tusk marks are clearly recognizable where they have gouged the rock. So actually a couple interesting parallels there. The connection to the seeing where the elephants with their tusks have like cut gashes in the rock in the walls of the caves, kind of like the marks on the cave walls left by the cave bears, but also all the poop, all the poop of all the visitors accumulating over the thousands of years. Yeah.
Yeah, it's crazy. You know, all this also reminds me of an episode we did a while back on giant sloths, a particular variety of giant sloth that would have dug itself kind of a burrow into, kind of like deep into burrow, creating eventually over time as they reuse these spaces, a kind of tunnel in the earth.
funny you should mention that because the fourth case study that the authors bring up in this paper is evidence related to what's called Milodon Cave in Patagonia in Chile. They say that it is possible that this is a case of cave formation by salt ingestion long ago, this time implicating extinct giant ground slots. This is fully speculative, but they do highlight this as a possibility explaining where this cave came from. But
But to come back and conclude the look at the Mount Elgon caves. So they say what we do know is that animals come to these caves to consume mineral laden soil and rocks. So these caves could be thought of as massive salt licks or mineral licks. There are generally no permanent streams running out of the caves so that that's not an option for removal of cave material by like permanent water water passage. So.
Some water does appear to run out of the caves during flooding events.
But how much rock material is removed during these events in this way is uncertain. So we still, in the end, don't know the relative amounts. We don't know how much of the cave formation is due to water solution versus how much is due to animals eating the rock. But they think that both processes contribute and their judgment in the end is that the contribution of the elephants is the primary process. Yeah.
Wow. Either way, it's amazing to imagine elephants going into caves to eat the rocks. Yeah, it's amazing. And you know, we shouldn't cast too much judgment. Like you mentioned earlier, humans...
very often don't have to worry about getting enough salt. We eat at a restaurant once and we get like a colossal salt bomb, right? We get more than enough salt. We get an unhealthy amount of salt ingested into our bodies. But if we didn't have those food sources,
We might be out there licking the sides of mountains just like these various herbivores are, assuming we also didn't eat copious amounts of meat on top of that, which is another factor to consider here. Yeah.
All right. Well, does that do it for this exploration of caves? I'm sure we'll be back in the future. Yeah, there's all I mean, we've we've covered caves in the past. Yeah, we'll be back in the future. And there are a number of fascinating cave organisms that we we didn't cover in these episodes. And if you have favorites right in, we'd love to hear from you because we could always venture back into the caves. You know, we don't reside there all the time, but we we go in from time to time in order to discuss something interesting.
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