Two brave hunters are stalking one of the mightiest of beasts: the cave bear. They are armed with their best stone weapons, but will those be enough against the bear’s great strength, teeth, and claws?
The Playmobil cave bear(Ursus spelaeus) measures about 10.5 cm long and is medium brown in colour with black eyes, a red tongue, and white teeth. Although its body is mostly smooth, it does have some shaggy parts on its head and limbs. Its mouth opens wide, its head raises and lowers, and its shoulders and hips rotate. Sadly, it cannot stand up on its hind legs. But that’s just as well, given that the toy has a large hole in its abdomen.
Despite its simplicity, this bear manages to look fairly ferocious for a Playmobil toy thanks to its large head, teeth, and claws. As far as accuracy goes, however, its forehead needs to be steeper and its body should be chunkier in order to be a proper Ursus spelaeus. Indeed, this figure is something of a cheat given that it’s been used to represent modern bears in other Playmobil sets. Nevertheless, it is billed as a cave bear here and so I shall treat it as one.
And here are two very hairy, very pale-skinned cave men, one with red hair, the other with brown hair. I call them Gregory and Luis. They are decked out in elaborate grey animal skin clothing and painted on bone and shell jewelry. Gregory has a hide pouch on his belt for holding tools and Luis wears a wolf skin headdress. They are equipped with stone hand axes, a spear, and an axe. They will certainly need them if they hope to take down that cave bear!
The remains of a carcass have been provided for the cave bear to gnaw on. Its den consists of a small, rocky cave. A deciduous tree similar to the one that came with the Pteranodon is growing on the roof and there is a large outcropping that appears to have been carved in the shape of a bear’s head. It has long been a popular notion that early humans worshipped bears, although there is no conclusive evidence for it. Bear fossils have been found in caves, but most of them may have simply died there naturally. However, there are a few instances of bear bones being arranged in unnatural patterns, as though they were part of some ritual. As with so many other paleontological mysteries, we may never know for certain.
What is for certain is that this is a pretty nice set. The cave bear by itself admittedly isn’t spectacular, but combined with the hunters and the cave, it makes for a fun purchase. Recommended.
Available from Amazon.com here and Amazon.co.uk here.
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[…] As you can see, they appear to be of different ethnicity from from the humans that came with the cave bear set. Perhaps that one takes place in Europe while this one is occurring somewhere in the Americas. Their […]