Were there Wild Lions in Ancient Greece?

Greek myths tell us about several lions: Herakles and the Nemean lion, etc. There were no lions in Greece in classical times and have been none since, but, on the other hand, there certainly were at some point in the distant Ice Age past. So when did they die out? Do the appearances of lions in Greek legends record memories of real lions in Archaic times, or were those stories transplanted from Asia?

Though such theories were long dismissed by other researchers, in 1978, two prominent German zooarchaeologists made a startling discovery. During an excavation of Tiryns—the same city whose legendary king dared Hercules into action—they chanced upon a feline heel bone near a human skeleton. It was unmistakably from a lion, they concluded, and possibly of the same species that inhabits parts of the African continent today.

The bone was only the first of dozens to surface in Tiryns and elsewhere over the following decades. Though some details remain unclear, many archaeologists and historians now use this evidence to conclude that modern lions once lived alongside people in parts of what is today Europe, including Greece, for hundreds of years. Today lion bones offer a rare glimpse into the Bronze Age world and the fraught relationship humans had with these fierce predators, animals that inspired legends and creative works for centuries.

“Now it’s possible to say that some [lion images] could have been recalled from real experiences on the [Greek] mainland,” says art historian Nancy Thomas. The finds, she adds, cast “a whole different light on the art … and how hunting real lions could have played into the elite structure development that was going on in Greece at the time.”

Reported finds of post-Ice Age lions

The number of bones reported from across southeastern Europe is somewhat convincing, but I don't know anything about how the bones were dated (lots of older radiocarbon dates on bone are wrong). The many representations of lions in art don't help the case much, because many are obviously copies from renderings of lions in the art of Mesopotamia or Egypt. 

Anyway it is fun to imagine that a tale like Heracles and the Nemean Lion represents one of the last wild lions in Greece, a time when they still existed but were so rare as to be truly remarkable.