Bears in northern species enter winter dormancy, and the physiology is more interesting than hibernation. Body temperature drops only a few degrees rather than to near ambient, the animal can be roused, and it neither eats, drinks, urinates nor defecates for months, recycling urea into protein and losing very little muscle mass, a capacity studied seriously for its medical implications. Females give birth during dormancy and nurse cubs while fasting. The bear that goes into the ground in autumn and comes out in spring with young is therefore doing exactly what the symbolism says it does.
Greece. Artemis had strong bear associations. At Brauron in Attica, girls before marriage served the goddess as arktoi, she-bears, in a rite whose details are only partly recoverable. The myth of Callisto, an attendant of Artemis transformed into a bear and set among the stars, ties the goddess to the constellation.
The sky. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor carry the bear name in Greek and Latin, and the striking fact is that some Indigenous North American traditions also identify the same stars as a bear, with the handle stars read as hunters pursuing it. Whether this reflects an extremely old shared tradition carried across the Bering land bridge, or independent invention, is genuinely debated and is one of the more serious arguments in comparative astronomy. It is not settled.
Etymology. The Germanic word bear descends from a root meaning brown, and the Slavic medved means honey-eater. Both look like substitutions for a lost original name, and the usual explanation is a hunting taboo against saying the animal's name, plausible and widely repeated, though the evidence for it is inference from the words themselves.