I went to the zoo a couple months back with my boy. At the African Lion exhibit you can stand right next to them as they continually pace behind 4" glass. Those beasts are massive! It would have been a dangerous game to hunt one or more of those back then, especially with flint tipped weapons.
At Lotte World in South Korea, they had custom busses with bullet proof glass sides, and hooks welded on the outside. They would hang raw meat on the hooks, then drive into three separate enclosures with grizzlies, lions and tigers respectively and the beasts would climb all over the bus to get at the meat. You got to see them up real close in virtual attack mode...something I'd never care to see without the benefit of the bulletproof glass!
That’s just the males. The females aren’t much bigger than a german shepherd.
They were a social bunch.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/humanity/evolutn.txt
[snip] Numerous fossils came from carefully prepared graves, some as old as 100,000 years. In several instances, the deceased had been old and crippled (like Boule’s specimen) and had received care for years before being laid to rest. In one grave, a youth had been buried carefully on his side, with one arm tucked under his head, as if he were sleeping; in one hand, he held a beautifully carved quartz knife. In another grave, archaeologists found the body of an elderly Neanderthal who had had his forearm amputated years before in his youth. (Surgery 60,000 years ago!) He had been cared for all his life. And in yet another Neanderthal site, researchers found evidence that the deceased had been buried with flowers. [James B. Stenson, Headmaster of Northridge Preparatory School in Des Plaines, Illinois]