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.
1 Alaska Quaternary Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA.
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
