For the second time this week, bears in Henan are back in the news.
Experts from the Henan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archeology (HPICA) say that a bear skeleton unearthed near the city of Nanyang proves how Chinese people tamed the creature at least 2,800 years ago.
They have hypothesized that the grounds where the bear was found were a sacrificial pit from the late Western Zhou Dynasty (1046–771 BC). Archeologist Ma Xiaolin explained that "we don't know yet when Chinese began to tame bears, but from the discovery of the skeleton we can at least infer that they had the practice during the late Western Zhou Dynasty."
After dating the bones, experts concluded by examining teeth and skull that they belonged to a male black bear that died when it was five years old. The case took a curious turn, however, when they realized that the bear's left leg was 29 millimeters shorted than the right one.
X-ray analysis of the left leg showed that it probably suffered a fracture when the bear was a cub. In the wild, such an injury would almost certainly have resulted in the cub's death by natural selection. The fact that the bear enjoyed healthy growth for a full five years therefore suggests that it was cared for by humans after being captured in infancy, perhaps sustaining his leg injury during capture.
The final problem – why people would then bury the bear – was quickly resolved: the dig site was located at the birthplace of Chu, an ancient Chinese kingdom that encompassed today's Hubei, Hunan and Henan, as well as parts of Chongqing, Guizhou, Anhui, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai.
The Chu state was founded by Yuxiong, teacher to King Wen of Zhou, in the 11th century BC. When his son sat on the throne, however, he took the second character of his father's name – Xiong, literally "bear" – as the royal clan name of Chu. Since Chu people bore the ancestral name Xiong, HPICA archeologist Hou Yanfeng says "it is very likely that bears were tamed and raised for sacrificial use at that time."
Today, Xiong is the 72nd most common surname in China.
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