Pleistocene Brown Bears in the Mid-Continent of North America
Paul Matheus,1*
James Burns,2
Jaco Weinstock,3
Michael Hofreiter4
Current biogeographic models hypothesize that brown bears migrated
from Asia to the New World ~100 to 50 thousand years ago but
did not reach areas south of Beringia until ~13 to 12 thousand
years ago, after the opening of a mid-continental ice-free corridor.
We report a 26-thousand-year-old brown bear fossil from central
Alberta, well south of Beringia. Mitochondrial DNA recovered
from the specimen shows that it belongs to the same clade of
bears inhabiting southern Canada and the northern United States
today and that modern brown bears in this region are probably
descended from populations that persisted south of the southern
glacial margin during the Last Glacial Maximum.
2 Provincial Museum of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
3 Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
4 Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ffpem1{at}uaf.edu
