page_title: Eurasian brown bear
section_title: Species origin
hierarchical_section_title: Eurasian brown bear / Species origin
caption_attribution_description: English: A European Brown Bear lying in the morning sun in the Bärengraben in Berne, Switzerland. I shot this photo on March 16, 2005 with an Olympus C750 UZ digital camera. Deutsch: Ein Braunbär liegt in der Morgensonne im Bärengraben in Bern, Schweiz. Fotografiert am 16. März 2005 mit einer Olympus C750 UZ Digitalkamera.
context_page_description: The Eurasian brown bear is one of the most common subspecies of the brown bear, and is found in much of Eurasia. It is also known as the European brown bear, common brown bear, common bear, and colloquially by many other names. "The genetic diversity of present-day brown bears has been extensively studied over the years and appears to be geographically structured into five main clades based upon analysis of the mtDNA."
context_section_description: The oldest fossils are from the Choukoutien, China, and date back about 500,000 years. It is known from mtDNA studies that during the Pleistocene ice age it was too cold for the brown bear to survive in Europe except in three places: Russia, Spain, and the Balkans.
  Modern research has made it possible to track the origin of the subspecies. The species to which it belongs developed more than 500,000 years ago, and researchers have found that the Eurasian brown bear separated about 850,000 years ago, with one branch based in Western Europe and the other branch in Western Europe, Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia. Through research of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), researchers have found that the European family has divided into two clades—one in the Iberian Peninsula and the Balkans, the other in Russia.
  There is a population in Scandinavia that includes bears of the western and eastern lineages.
  By analyzing the mtDNA of the southern population, researchers have found that they have probably come from populations in the Pyrenees in Southern France and Spain and the Cantabrian Mountains (Spain). Bears from these populations spread to southern Scandinavia after the last ice age. The northern bear populations originate in the Finnish/Russian population. Probably their ancestors survived the ice age in the ice-free areas west of the Ural Mountains, and thereafter spread to Northern Europe.
caption: Eurasian brown bear resting
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