Unusual Plot of Bear Hunt in the Petroglyphs of Khara Jamat Gol (Mongolian Altai)

The petroglyphs left by the inhabitants of the mountains and steppes of Eurasia are very numerous. The main subjects include hunting, warfare, weaponry, wheeled vehicles, and many more. For thousands of years, the most common subject was wild animals. The article presents a rare subject of petroglyphs from the Mongolian Altai. During the survey of the Khara Jamat Gol valley, accumulation of petroglyphs was found on the left bank of the river in the Sabi-Salaa area in the northwestern Mongolia near the Mongolian-Russian border. A multifigured composition of bear hunt with dogs chasing and attacking bears was pecked on a vertical slate slab. Hunters are armed with bows and clubs. The manner of rendering people and animals points to the Bronze Age as the time when this composition was created. In the mountains and steppes of Eurasia, bears were represented on the petroglyphs much less often than other animals, such as mountain goats, red deer, bulls, elks, wild boars, feline predators, and wolves). The interaction of bears and humans was reproduced only in two places in the Mongolian Altai. This rare subject finds parallels in the rock art of Fennoscandia. The composition of hunting bear with dogs is known from Pegtymel - the northernmost place of the Asian petroglyphs. Unusual subjects on the rocks of the Sabi Salaa in the Mongolian Altai and in the Tsagaan-Gol valley reflect the hunting practices of cattle breeders from the Sayan-Altai region in the Bronze Age. Obviously, brown bears would appear from time to time in high-mountain valleys of the Mongolian Altai and were hunted by the local population

Archaeology · Biology · Bronze Age · Central asia · Geography · Physical geography · Predation · Prehistory · Rock art · Steppe · Human-Animal Interaction Studies · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology · Ecology