I knew they were big bears but not TWICE A HUMAN size! I didn't even google this image for the polar bear I wanted to see how big a black bear is.
guess I'm never going to Antarctica!
this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2026
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Because the name actually doesn’t have anything to do with real bears.
It was directional about the constellation Ursa Major (which in Greek is Arktos Megale).
There’s also Ursa Minor which is the little bear constellation, that contains the north star and is a great navigational tool.
Arctic and Antarctic basically just mean north and south.
Would they have called that constellation Ursa Major if not for the presence of bears in that direction? Maybe the constellation naming was like, "don't go too far towards bear country if you don't want to deal with bears that think of humans as food." "Bears this way. Bears ahead."
There were bears all over Europe. They were a huge part of Greek and Roman mythology. They didn’t know anything about polar bears at the time.
Bears have been important in many cultures, and Ursa Major is depicted as a bear in many non-Greek cultures as well, going back to prehistory.
Many North American indigenous tribes depict it as a bear, long before European contact. Same with pre-Islamic Arabian cultures.
It was named because the constellation looks like a bear, not because it pointed to where bears were. Even Native Americans called that constellation a bear, and they had bears south of them.