The ritual treatment of bears is one of the most widely distributed religious complexes in the northern hemisphere, and it is genuinely ancient rather than a modern reconstruction.
The best-documented example is the Ainu iyomante of Hokkaido and Sakhalin. A bear cub was taken and raised in the village, sometimes nursed by a woman, treated as a guest and honoured for a year or two, and then ritually killed at a great feast so that the spirit, a kamuy visiting in the form of a bear, could return to its own world laden with gifts and speak well of its hosts. The rite was suppressed under Japanese assimilation policy and banned in 1955, and has since been revived in limited and modified forms. It is not a hunt: the logic is hospitality and reciprocal obligation, and understanding it requires taking that logic seriously rather than reading it as sacrifice in the Mediterranean sense.
Comparable practices, with the same core of apology to the animal and careful disposal of the skull and bones so that the bear may be reborn, are recorded among the Sami, the Khanty and Mansi of western Siberia, the Nivkh of the Amur and Sakhalin, and Finnic peoples, where the Finnish Karhunpeijaiset was a bear feast with its own extensive oral poetry.
The claim of a Middle Palaeolithic bear cult, based on arrangements of cave bear skulls at sites such as Drachenloch, was influential in the mid-twentieth century and has been substantially abandoned: the deposits are now generally explained by natural accumulation and cave-bear behaviour. It is a good example of a claim that circulated widely, was taken up in popular writing, and did not survive re-excavation.