One of my facebook friends posted this image of what looks very much like a bear engraved into a rock face in the middle of the Sahara and estimated to be 6000 years old:
This was labelled with a name approximately meaning "Boogieman" but to me it looks like an extremely good portrait of a Eurasian brown bear with a small hump on the shoulders, pom-pom ears, dished face, "Piglike" snout and even a sort of a grin on his face. He seems to be carrying off a goat or ram slung over his shoulder. From Roman-age records we also know that the Ethiopian bear known to be flourishing then was of much the same appearance and nature. When the Arabs began setting up trading posts in East Africa (at about the same time as the Viking Age in the North Atlantic), they made mentions of what they called a
Duba according to Heuvelmans, the usual word meaning "Bear", and apparently all along the
Zanj or Eastern coast of Africa down to Zanzibar.
It would seem to me that people who had been saying "there are no bears in Africa to account for the Nandi Bear (
Chemosit or 'Boogeyman' )" have just been wrong all along to say that. The simplest hypothesis is that the Nandi bear really is a bear, and a not especially unusual bear, either.
