The Chauvet Cave panels, painted roughly thirty thousand years ago, include some of the most accurate animal drawings from the Palaeolithic. The lions depicted lack the conspicuous mane of male African lions, and several show a faint tuft or bar near the tail. Whether the artists distinguished sexes is uncertain, but no maned individual has been identified in the corpus of European cave art.
Frozen cubs recovered from Siberian permafrost, including specimens found in the 2010s, preserve dense pale to light brown fur suited to cold. Being juveniles, they say nothing directly about adult male ornament, but they do establish coat colour and texture that no fossil bone could provide.
Genetic work confirms Panthera spelaea as a lineage distinct from modern lions, diverging roughly half a million years ago and showing no evidence of interbreeding with them. The name cave lion is a misnomer of the same type as cave bear: the animals used caves occasionally, but they hunted on open steppe, following reindeer, horses and young mammoths.