What are you looking at?
This bear bone is on loan from MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) and is currently on display at the Bears! Exhibition at the University of Nottingham Museum. This is the left tibia (shin bone) of an adult brown bear (Ursus arctos). It lived some time between 1540 and 1680, on the south bank of the Thames in Southwark.
Why is it important?
There are lots of things we can learn from this single bone. For example, given that it has fused at both ends, it must be from a bear that is at least 6 years old. This, for a brown bear, would make it sexually mature (i.e., an adult!). Of course, we don’t know whether or not bears were bred in early modern London, but it seems very unlikely given the conditions they were kept in.
What can it tell us?
The rough patch of bone on the side of the shaft towards the ankle indicates that this bear suffered some sort of injury or infection in the soft tissue that overlay the bone. There is also a bony spur towards the top of the shaft (you can see it as a slight hook): this is what archaeologists call an enthesopathy—a place where a tendon has been damaged and the body has responded by growing a little bony spur. Such a spur suggests that the bear had an active life; these are precisely the injuries we might expect to see given we know how widespread bear-baiting was in the period.
The small yellow oval in the image indicates where we have sampled this bone for stable isotope and ancient DNA analyses. Analyses of the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the bone collagen can tell us what animals ate. Bone collagen is the stuff that makes our bones bouncy and means we don’t break them whenever we knock into things or fall over. It continually renews during our lives, with different bones turning over at different rates, and overall it tells us about the diet of the animal in the years before it died. At the same time, collagen taken from the animal’s tooth roots (called ‘dentine’) can tell us about the diet of bear cubs. You can read more about our isotope work in collaboration with the British Geological Survey on their page on animal diets.
The ancient DNA analysis we are conducting will tell us what sex the bear was and from which European population it is most likely to have come. Such discoveries are possible thanks to scientific collaboration. In this case, we’re working with Dr Erik Ersmark from Stockholm and Dr Cereidwen Edwards at the University of Huddersfield, who have provided us with bear samples to compare our early modern bears with. By finding out which population it, and the other bears we have sampled, came from, we will learn which populations were being exploited in this early modern period. Find out more about our ancient DNA work on our page about sampling DNA.
We will add to this page as results for this specific bear come through.
