About 32.000-26.000 BP the largest cave bears Ursus ingressus Rabeder et
al. 2004 used the Sophie’s Cave such as other larger cave bear dens of the Zoolithen
Cave, Große Teufels Cave and Geisloch Cave and others in Upper Franconia. At this
time the large portal of the today’s entrance was opened. In this hall and branching
areas, the cave was used for denning and birth. The Ailsbach River terrace changed
first with an elevation increasing that caused periodical floods of the anterior valley
oriented cave part only. Within the partly dry cave, seasonal floods cleft two more
fluvial sequences, which are dominated in the first stage by sands and gravels. In the
last stage, “gravel/frost brekzia/glauconite sand till series” of the latest Late Pleistocene
and around the LGM (app. 32.000-16.000 BP) the floods finally transported sediment
and the bones only into the Ahornloch branching halls and Passages. The large cave
bears were also scavenged and predated by the three top predators (lions, hyenas and
wolves) that specialized especially in boreal forests on cave bear feeding as a result of
rare and disappearing valley migratory mammoth steppe game. Hyenas used the
Sophie’s Cave only shortly as den in the Ahornloch Hall area and imported typical for
cave dens in Europe some woolly mammooth Mammuthus primigenius (Blumenbach
1799), woolly rhinoceros Coelodonta antiquitatis (Blumenbach 1799), and Equus
caballus przewalski Poljakov 1888 horse prey remains into the cave entrance halls,
which bones show typical hyena caused bite/chew damage. Already before the climatic
change not later then 24.000 BP, before the Last Glacial Maximium glacier extensions
in Europe (LGM, 19.000 BP), with unsolved questionable “glacial signs” (?valley
glaciers) in Upper Franconia and within the Sophie’s Cave, caused the extinction of the
last cave bears, their top predators, and most of the boreal forest megafauna in Upper
Franconia and central Europe.
Keywords: Final Late Pleistocene, sedimentology, terrace gravel infill, Ailsbach
Valley geomorphology, glacial signs, largest cave bear species, cave bear den,
bone taphonomy, predators and scavengers.
