Mysterious bear figurines baffle archaeologists

The way the Dorset culture viewed the relationship between humans and animals is known as animism – a phenomenon also known from other cultures.

“We know that the relationship between bears and humans has been crucial in all pre-modern cultures. This applies almost as far back in time as we can trace – all the way back to the very earliest renderings of the world that humans have created,” says Odgaard's colleague at the National Museum, Martin Appelt.

For instance, we see this relationship expressed in small carvings and cave paintings of humans and bears from the hunter-gatherer culture.

“Many cultures have combined human and animal features in their illustrations – e.g. a figurine of a bear with a falcon’s body, where the underside depicts a carved human head,” he says.

On many figurines from early cultures, the skeleton is cut so that it’s visible outside the body – and that’s also the case with Meldgaard’s bear figurine.

According to Appelt, this bears witness to a belief that the difference between humans and animals only lies in the skin they’re wearing, so to speak.

“So an animal is also a person – only with a different skin. And some of them have probably been regarded as spirits – i.e. people in a parallel universe to ours.”
The bear was something special

The apparent fact that bears were regarded as something special could be because the bear, along with man, is one of the few animals that were believed to transcend and travel between the worlds of land and sea.

Another explanation may be that humans and bears could change roles depending on the situation: sometimes it was the man who hunted the bear and sometimes it was vice versa.