The bones also bear precise cut marks and signs of scraping — telltale indicators that people butchered the animals and prepared their pelts long ago, possibly for ritual purposes.

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“Hunting a lion was very dangerous,” lead author Marián Cueto, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Cantabria in Spain, told USA Today. The now-extinct animals were larger than modern lions and weighed as much as 600 pounds. For the prehistoric people who skinned the cave lion, the pelt probably conferred strength, prestige and power.

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“It probably had an important role as a trophy and significant use in a ritual place,” Cueto said.

The bones come from La Garma cave — a trove of Paleolithic artifacts that was sealed off when its entrance collapsed about 14,000 years ago. The cavern, in Spain's Cantabrian mountains, contains thousands of animal bones, many of them bearing the marks of humans. Long-abandoned huts stand empty inside the chamber, and ancient paintings cover the walls.

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“When you walk into the cave, it’s like traveling back to a specific moment in our evolution,” Cueto told Smithsonian magazine. “It’s like a time machine.”

The nine cave lion toe bones discovered by Cueto and her colleagues were found just outside one of the huts. Seeking an explanation for how only the claws remained, the scientists reasoned that they might have once been part of one of those lion-skin rugs still sometimes displayed today — which often have feet (and sometimes heads) still attached. The pelt probably covered the hut's walls or floor, and when the skin biodegraded thousands of years ago, only the bones were left behind.

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The particular marks on the bones suggest that the humans knew their way around their cave lion carcass. This wasn't a one-off kill, Cueto and her colleagues argue: The people of the Paleolithic era were hunting cave lions.

The extinction of cave lions about 14,000 years ago has long been attributed to climactic changes at the end of the last ice age. But this discovery, coupled with a similar find from Swabian Jura, Germany, suggests that humans may have played a role. Although hunting a cave lion would have been a difficult and risky task, the expansion of the human population during this period — and the prestige associated with killing a lion — could have made humans a substantial threat. Even in the prehistoric era, animals were not safe from trophy hunters.

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“A tentative proposal might be to link this knowledge to an important role in human culture resulting in a key factor that should be taken into account to understand cave lion extinction,” the authors said.

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Other scientists are skeptical of this claim.

Craig Packer, director of the Lion Research Center at the University of Minnesota who was not part of the study, told the Christian Science Monitor: “Unfortunately, there is no evidence of how the lion died — the people occupying the cave may have found it dead from natural causes. Lions quite frequently kill each other during territorial disputes, and make an enormous amount of noise during their fights, so people could have ventured forth to collect the body after it was already dead.”

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But Packer said the researchers' conclusions about cave lions' cultural significance are sound.

“Whether or not this particular specimen was actually killed by people,” he continued, “the fact that it occupied such a central place in the floor of that cave illustrates that it played an important role in the minds of those people.”