From 73,000 years ago to 20,000 years ago (late Pleistocene), the following organisms inhabited the Japanese archipelago. Cave lion (Panthera spelea)a new genetic and proteomic analysis of fossilized feline remains shows that previously Tiger (panthera tigris).
A cave lion painted at Chauvet Cave in France.
Lions and tigers were widespread apex predators during the Late Pleistocene and were essential components of the East Asian megafauna.
Cave lions lived primarily in northern Eurasia, while tigers were distributed further south.
“Since their emergence about 2 million years ago, lions and tigers, dominant apex predators, appear to have shaped the evolutionary trajectory of other sympatric carnivores through direct and indirect competition, and influenced herbivore populations through predation,” said researchers Shu-Jin Luo and colleagues at Peking University.
“Then, about a million years ago, when lions dispersed from Africa and began expanding their ranges across Eurasia, lions and tigers may have become important competitors for each other.”
“However, their geographic ranges now no longer overlap due to the large-scale contraction that occurred across southwestern Eurasia by the early 20th century due to anthropogenic activities. Today, the closest existing populations are more than 300 km apart in India.”
“In contrast, during the Late Pleistocene, lion and tiger range overlap and interactions may have occurred more frequently along a transition zone known as the lion-tiger transition zone, which stretches across Eurasia from the Middle East through Central Asia to the Far East,” the researchers said.
“The Japanese archipelago, the easternmost part of the zone, has long been considered a late Pleistocene tiger refuge. The supporting big cat subfossils were traditionally thought to belong to tigers, but their taxonomic identity remained unresolved.”
To uncover the origin and evolutionary history of Japan’s Pleistocene cats, researchers reviewed 26 subfossils recovered from several locations on the Japanese archipelago.
“Using mitochondrial and nuclear genome hybridization capture and sequencing, paleoproteomics, Bayesian molecular dating, and radiocarbon dating, we unexpectedly found that all of the ancient Japanese ‘tiger’ remains that yielded molecular data were cave lions,” the researchers said.
Despite the extremely low endogenous DNA content in most specimens, the scientists were able to recover five nearly complete mitochondrial genomes and one partial nuclear genome.
Their phylogenetic analysis showed that the Japanese specimens formed a well-documented monophyletic group nested within the Late Pleistocene cave lion lineage. Speller-1.
Nuclear genome analysis of the best-preserved specimens confirmed this result and distinguished the lion lineage from the tiger.
Paleoproteomic analysis identified additional diagnostic amino acid variants in α-2-HS-glycoprotein that match lions but not tigers.
According to the research team, cave lions dispersed across the Japanese archipelago between about 72,700 and 37,500 years ago, when a land bridge connected northern Japan to the mainland during the last ice age.
The animals have reached the southwestern part of the archipelago, despite habitat previously thought to be tiger-friendly.
They coexisted with wolves, brown bears, black bears, and early humans and formed an integral part of the late Pleistocene ecosystem of the archipelago.
The authors suggest that: Speller-1 The cave lion may have survived on the Japanese archipelago for at least 20,000 years after it became extinct in Eurasia and more than 10,000 years after its last extinction in eastern Beringia.
“Future resurveys of lion and tiger subfossil sites across mid-latitudes of Eurasia are essential to elucidate species range dynamics and resolve oscillations in the lion-tiger belt,” the researchers concluded.
of study On January 26, 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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Shin San others. 2026. During the late Pleistocene, the Japanese archipelago protected cave lions rather than tigers. PNAS 123 (6): e2523901123;doi: 10.1073/pnas.2523901123