Research overview: the cave lion across Beringia and Eurasia

This overview examines the vast geographic range of the cave lion, which spread across northern Eurasia and into Beringia and parts of northwestern North America during the Pleistocene. This enormous distribution made Panthera spelaea one of the most widely ranging large cats of the Ice Age, adapted to cold mammoth-steppe environments. The survey reviews the fossil evidence mapping its range, the recognition of a distinct Beringian form sometimes named as a separate subspecies, and how the cave lion's distribution relates to that of the American lion south of the ice sheets. It discusses how the spread of cave lions across the northern continents reflects the connectivity of mammoth-steppe faunas and informs reconstructions of lion dispersal, regional differentiation, and eventual extinction.