We Were Wrong About The Cave Lion
We Were Wrong About The Cave Lion
For most of the last century, calling the cave lion Panthera leo spelaea made perfect sense. Every new fossil seemed to support that idea. Its skeleton looked unmistakably lion-like, and without DNA, there was little reason to think otherwise. That changed in June 2026, when an international team of researchers published the most detailed genetic study of cave lions ever completed. Instead of relying on a handful of fossils, they reconstructed the genomes of 12 cave lions collected across Eurasia and northern North America, some more than 148,000 years old, and compared them with the genomes of 20 modern lions from Africa and India.
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➽Narrated By: Christian Neale
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