When was economist James Tobin born?

James Tobin (March 5, 1918 – March 11, 2002) was an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He developed the ideas of Keynesian economics, and advocated government intervention to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored endogenous variables, the well-known "Tobit model". Tobin received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981.

James Tobin

Outside academia, Tobin was widely known for his suggestion of a tax on foreign exchange transactions, now known as the "Tobin tax". This was designed to reduce speculation in the international currency markets, which he saw as dangerous and unproductive.

Tobin was born on March 5, 1918, in Champaign, Illinois. His father was Louis Michael Tobin, (b. 1879) a journalist working at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His father had fought in World War I, was a member of the first Greek organization at Illinois (Delta Tau Delta fraternity Beta Upsilon chapter), and was credited as the inventor of 'Homecoming'. His mother, Margaret Edgerton Tobin (b. 1893), was a social worker. Tobin followed primary school at the University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, a laboratory school in the university's campus.

In 1935, on his father's advice, Tobin took the entrance exams for Harvard University. Despite no special preparation for the exams, he passed and was admitted with a national scholarship from the university. During his studies he first read Keynes' "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money", published in 1936. Tobin graduated "summa cum laude" in 1939 with a thesis centered on a critical analysis of Keynes' mechanism for introducing equilibrium involuntary unemployment. His first published article, in 1941, was based on this senior's thesis.

Tobin immediately started graduate studies, also at Harvard, earning his M.A. degree in 1940. In 1941, he interrupted graduate studies to work for the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply and the War Production Board in Washington, D.C. The next year, after the United States entered World War II, he enlisted in the US Navy, spending the war as an officer on a destroyer, including, among possible others, the. At the end of the war he returned to Harvard and resumed studies, receiving his Ph.D. in 1947 with a thesis on the consumption function written under the supervision of Joseph Schumpeter. In 1947 Tobin was elected a Junior Fellow of Harvard's Society of Fellows, which allowed him the freedom and funding to spend the next three years studying and doing research.

In 1950 Tobin moved to Yale University, where he remained for the rest of his career. He joined the Cowles Foundation, which moved to Yale in 1955, also serving as its president between 1955–1961 and 1964–1965. His main research interest was to provide microfoundations to Keynesian economics, with a special focus on monetary economics. One of his frequent collaborators was his Yale colleague William Brainard. In 1957 Tobin was appointed Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale.

Besides teaching and research, Tobin was also strongly involved in the public life, writing on current economic issues and serving as an economic expert and policy consultant. During 1961–62, he served as a member of John F. Kennedy's Council of Economic Advisors, under the chairman Walter Heller, then acted as a consultant between 1962–68. Here, in close collaboration with Arthur Okun, Robert Solow and Kenneth Arrow, he helped design the Keynesian economic policy implemented by the Kennedy administration. Tobin also served for several terms as a member of the Board of Governors of Federal Reserve System Academic Consultants and as a consultant of the US Treasury Department.

Tobin was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal in 1955 and, in 1981, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. He was a fellow of several professional associations, holding the position of president of the American Economic Association in 1971.

In 1972 Tobin, along with fellow Yale economics professor William Nordhaus, published "Is Growth Obsolete?", an article that introduced the Measure of Economic Welfare as the first model for economic sustainability assessment, and economic sustainability measurement.

In 1982–1983, Tobin was Ford Visiting Research Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1988 he formally retired from Yale, but continued to deliver some lectures as Professor Emeritus and continued to write. He died on March 11, 2002, in New Haven, Connecticut.

Tobin was a trustee of Economists for Peace and Security.

James Tobin married Elizabeth Fay Ringo, a former M.I.T. student of Paul Samuelson, on September 14, 1946. They had four children: Margaret Ringo (born in 1948), Louis Michael (born in 1951), Hugh Ringo (born in 1953) and Roger Gill (born in 1956). In late June, 2009, the family announced via a private email that Tobin's wife had died at the age of 90.

In August 2009 in a roundtable interview in Prospect "magazine", Adair Turner supported the idea of new global taxes on financial transactions, warning that the "swollen" financial sector paying excessive salaries had grown too big for society. Lord Turner's suggestion that a "Tobin tax" – named after James Tobin – should be considered for financial transactions made headlines around the world.

Tobin's Tobit model of regression with censored endogenous variables (Tobin 1958a) is a standard econometric technique. His "q" theory of investment (Tobin 1969), the Baumol–Tobin model of the transactions demand for money (Tobin 1956), and his model of liquidity preference as behavior toward risk (the asset demand for money) (Tobin 1958b) are all staples of economics textbooks.

In his 1958 article Tobin also led the way in showing how to deal with utility maximization under uncertainty with an infinite number of possible states. As Palda explains "One way to get out of the mess of figuring out asset prices using a model of maximizing the expected utility of investing in stocks is to make assumptions about either preferences or the probabilities of the different possible states of the world. Nobellist James Tobin (1958) took this line and discovered that in some cases you do not need to worry about the utility of income in thousands of states, and the attached probabilities, to solve the consumer's choice on how to spread income among states. When preferences contain only a linear and a squared term (a case of diminishing returns) or the probabilities of different stock returns follow a normal distribution (an equation that contains a linear and squared terms as parameters), a simple formulation of a person's investment choices becomes possible. Under Tobin's assumptions we can reformulate the person's decision problem as being one of trading off risk and expected return. Risk, or more precisely the variance of your investment portfolio creates spread in the returns you expect. People are willing to assume more risk only if compensated by a higher level of expected return. One can thus think of a tradeoff people are willing to make between risk and expected return. They invest in risky assets to the point at which their willingness to trade off risk and return is equal to the rate at which they able to trade them off. It is difficult to exaggerate how brilliant is the simplification of the investment problem that flows from these assumptions. Instead of worrying about the investor's optimization problem in potentially millions of possible states of the world, one need only worry about how the investor can trade off risk and return in the stock market."


When was Aristagoras born?

Aristagoras (), d. 497/496 BC, was the leader of Miletus in the late 6th century BC and early 5th century BC and a key player during the early years of the Ionian Revolt against the Persian Achaemenid Empire. He was the son-in-law of Histiaeus, and inherited the tiranny of Miletus from him.

Aristagoras

By the time extant history hears of him, Aristagoras is already serving as deputy governor of Miletus, a polis on the western coast of Anatolia around 500 BC. He was the son of Molpagoras, previous tyrant of an independent Miletus, and brother-in-law (and nephew) of Histiaeus, whom the Persians had set up as tyrant, but never quite trusted. After general Megabazus presented his complaints about Histiaeus to Darius I of Persia, the latter summoned Histiaeus to his court and detained him at Susa, the main reason being that he wanted a trustworthy advisor. On the recommendation of Histiaeus, the Achaemenids then appointed Aristagoras as the new ruler of Miletus. Aristagoras ruled Miletus while Histiaeus remained in Susa. The assignment was put forward as temporary. Privately, everyone knew that he was being kept under observation away from his troops.
Aristagoras was the main orchestrator of the Ionian Revolt on secret instruction by Histiaeus, when the latter learned of Persian plans to interfere directly in Miletus. Aristagoras took advantage of Greek dissatisfaction with Persian rule to incite an alliance of the Greek poleis of Ionia. Soliciting assistance from the states of mainland Greece he failed to obtain the help of a major state, Sparta. He did obtain the half-hearted assistance of Athens. Their attack on the satrapy of Lydia having been defeated, they withdrew, abandoning Aristagoras to his fate.

In the last months of the failing revolt, the Persians were reconquering rebel country city by city. Choosing not to remain and make a stand alone, Aristagoras led a colony to Thrace, where he had negotiated a franchise to settle from the Thracians. No sooner did he arrive than he and all his men were massacred in a surprise attack by the Thracians, for reasons unspecified by Herodotus, whether loyal to the Great King, or influenced by the Scythians, who hated the Ionians for their rescue of the Great King, or just because they changed their minds about the number of Hellenes they would allow in their country. The revolt gained momentum briefly but then began to fail again. When all was nearly lost, the Great King allowed Histiaeus to convince him that he could settle the conflict and now should be sent back to Miletus. Aristagoras was gone. According to Herodotus, they never met again.

Histiaeus never succeeded in reaching Miletus. Reporting first to Sardis, undoubtedly still recovering from fire, whether with or without the Great King's complicity (Herodotus does not say), he was interrogated concerning his true loyalties. Histiaeus swore complete ignorance of the events of the revolt and unquestionable loyalty to the Persians. He admitted nothing, but the satrap, Artaphernes, was not in the least deceived. He said, "I will tell thee how the case stands, Histaeus: this shoe is of thy stitching; Aristagoras has but put it on.

Seeing that the jig was up, Histiaeus escaped that night and took ship at the coast, probably at Ephesus. He had no trouble raising troops and finding ships, but he found that he was not trusted by the revolutionaries. Miletus would not have him back. He became a soldier of fortune in the Aegean until he was hunted down and executed by Artaphernes. The Ionian revolt was finally settled in 494/493 BC. The Persians went on to plot the conquest of Greece under the pretext of a punitive campaign against Athens.

Certain exiled citizens of Naxos came to Miletus to seek refuge. They asked Aristagoras to supply them with troops, so that they could regain control of their homeland. Aristagoras considered that if he was able to supply troops to the Naxians, then he could become ruler of Naxos. So he agreed to assist the Naxians. He explained that he did not have enough troops of his own, but that Artaphernes, Darius’ brother and the Persian satrap of Lydia, who commanded a large army and navy on the coast of Asia, could help supply troops. The Naxians agreed to Aristagoras seeking Artaphernes' support and supplied him with money.

Aristagoras travelled to Sardis and suggested that Artaphernes attack Naxos and restore the exiles. The Persians would then gain control of the island. He explained to Artaphernes that Naxos “was a fine and fertile island, close to the Ionian coast, and rich both in treasures and slaves.” It was also the gateway to the Cyclades, which the Persians did not yet rule. Aristagoras promised that he would both fund the expedition and give Artaphernes a bonus sum. He also tempted Artaphernes by adding that capturing the island would place other poleis of the Cyclades under his control. They would serve as bases for an invasion of Euboea. After securing the permission of Susa, Artaphernes agreed and promised 200 ships.

The following spring, Aristagoras and the Naxian exiles sailed with the fleet. Unfortunately for the success of the invasion, Aristagoras quarrelled with the Persian admiral Megabates. He interfered in the discipline of the latter over the ship captains to save a friend from harsh punishment for an infraction (failure to set a watch on his ship). Aristagoras saved his friend but lost the friendship and loyalty of the Persian admiral, who expected to be in overall command. The schism was irreparable, being the very first incident of the subsequent Ionian revolt. Megabates sabotaged the entire operation by secretly informing the Naxians that they were about to be attacked, taking away the element of surprise. Naxos then had enough time to prepare for a siege. Four months later, the siege still held, the Persians were out of supplies and had only limited funds remaining. The expedition was then considered a failure and the Persians sailed home.

Due to his failure to make good on his Naxian promises, Aristagoras’ political position was at risk. He began to plan a revolt with the Milesians and the other Ionians. Meanwhile, Histiaeus, still detained at Susa, had tattooed a message upon the shaved head of a slave. Once his hair had grown back, he sent him to Aristagoras. The message told Aristagoras to revolt. Histiaeus, desperate to resume his authority at Miletus, hoped Darius would send him to deal with a Milesian revolt.

Both leaders being of the same mind, Aristagoras conferred with a council of his supporters, who agreed to a rebellion in Miletus in 499 BC. Aristagoras was supported by most of the citizens in council, except the historian Hecataeus. Hecataeus voted against the revolt because he believed that the Ionians would be out-matched. Defeat would be inevitable. Once the vote was taken, however, there is no evidence that he recused himself from the revolt. In fact, he had suggestions to make. Once the war began, the Ionians did not allow any fence-sitting among themselves, although they could not stop the larger allies from withdrawing. In general knowledge, warring nations do not allow citizens of any social status to comment from the sidelines without participating in the war effort.

As soon as the vote for war was certain, Aristagoras took steps to secure Persian military assets. The Naxos fleet was recovering from its ordeal at Myus. Now in a position of command – Herodotus is not specific – Aristagoras sent a party under Iatragoras to arrest the admirals still with the fleet, some several men. Ironically, these were mainly Greek. They were later released and sent home. Now that the rebellion was in the open, Aristagoras “set himself to damage Darius in every way he could think of.”

The scope of the revolt spread rapidly to all Ionia. Aristagoras foresaw that one city would soon be crushed. He therefore set about to create an alliance of all the Ionian cities, but the members also came from regions beyond Ionia. He made a number of constitutional changes, not all of which are clear. First he relinquished his own tyranny. Approaching the other states, he convinced them to end theirs. Finally he ordered all of the states to create a board of generals to report, apparently, to him. When his government was in place he sailed to Lacedaemon and other states of Greece in search of allies.

There has been some question as to the exact meaning of Herodotus' governmental terms, and as to the form of government of the Ionian alliance. The most fundamental question is where Aristagoras got his authority over the Ionians in the first place. They were all under the satrapy of Lydia, not under Miletus. The satrap was Persian. The tyrant of Miletus was appointed by the satrap, but he also appointed all the other tyrants. For reasons not specified in Herodotus, Miletus had the upper hand.

One can only assume a leadership role of some kind of Aristagoras over the other tyrants, whether personal or according to some unspecified convention. In order to gain the participation of the people in the revolt, we are told, Aristagoras "let go" the tyranny and established isonomia, which the translators translate variously with imprecise terms, such as "equality of government." According to Liddell and Scott, a standard dictionary of ancient Greek, Thucydides uses it to mean the "equality of rights" in a democracy.

Apparently Aristagoras established democracy, but then he went on to "put a stop to tyranny" in all the other Ionian cities, and moreover to insist that they select boards of generals reporting to him, which are not democratic powers. No voting is mentioned. Apparently a new sovereign state had been formed with Aristagoras as its chief. He had not stepped down, but up. The state had the power to levy taxes and troops. Aristagoras was commander of the joint armed forces. Miletus was to be the new capital. In fact the new sovereign Ionia issued its own coinage between 499 and its destruction by the Persians in 494.

Aristagoras appealed to the Spartan king, Cleomenes I, to help them throw off the Persian yoke. He praised the quality of the Spartan warriors, and argued that a pre-emptive invasion of Persia would be easy. To illustrate his view, he had brought along a "bronze tablet on which a map of all the earth was engraved, and all the sea, and all the rivers." No more information is given about the map, but the circumstantial evidence suggests it was most likely the world map of Hecataeus of Miletus, an important player in Milesian political life of the times.

Aristagoras claimed that the Persians would be easy to defeat, as they fought in “trousers and turbans,” clearly not a sign of good warriors. He also tempted him with Persian riches. Cleomenes asked Aristagoras to wait two days for an answer. When they next met, Cleomenes asked how long it would take to reach Susa, and upon learning that it was a three months’ journey, he firmly refused Spartan assistance as his troops would be gone for too long. At the time, Sparta was concerned over possible attacks from the Argives. The Greek historian Herodotus claimed that Aristagoras attempted to change Cleomenes’ mind with bribes, until the king's young daughter Gorgo warned that Aristagoras would corrupt him. Aristagoras left without the requested assistance.

Aristagoras next went to Athens, where he made a convincing speech, promising “everything that came into his head, until at last he succeeded.” Won over, the Athenians agreed to send ships to Ionia and Aristagoras went before them. The Athenians subsequently arrived in Miletus with twenty triremes and five others that belonged to the Eretrians. Herodotus described the arrival of these ships as the beginning of troubles between Greeks and barbarians. Once all his allies had arrived, Aristagoras put his brother Charopinus and another Milesian, Hermophantus, in charge of the expedition, and the whole contingent set out for the provincial capital, Sardis, while Aristagoras remained to govern at Miletus.

The first leg of the journey was to proceed along the coast to Ephesus. Using it as base, they went overland to Sardis, on which they descended by surprise. The satrap Artaphernes and his forces retreated to the acropolis immediately. A fire, started by accident in the town, accidentally burned down the temple of the Lydian goddess Cybebe (Cybele). Attributing the fire to Ionian maliciousness, the Persians later used it as an excuse for burning Greek temples.

The fire forced the defenders of the acropolis to abandon it in favor of the marketplace. Its defence coincided fortuitously with the arrival of Persian reinforcements. Interpreting the tumult as a counter-attack, The Ionians retreated to Tmolus, a nearby elevation, from which they escaped by night. The reinforcements followed the Ionians, caught up with them near Ephesus and soundly defeated them.

The Persians had obtained Lydia, including all the Greek cities, by defeating the last Anatolian-speaking kingdom of the same name. They made such a show of mercy as to win the hearts and minds of the Anatolians, as well as of some of the Greeks. In that sense, the "Ionian Revolt" was de facto an Anatolian civil war. A call for assistance went rapidly around the satrapy. Joint Persian-Anatolian forces hastened overnight to the assistance of the satrap.

They arrived with such short notice and major fanfare as to frighten away the Ionian-Athenian forces. The Cambridge Ancient History article attributes this swift arrival to the Persian cavalry, which also had no trouble tracking and catching the Ionians before the gates of Ephesus. The losses of the East Greeks were so great that they slunk away, so to speak, leaving Aristagoras and the rebels to fend for themselves. An air of doom pervaded the revolt, but they fought with such spirit that the rebellion spilled over into the islands

After this battle, the Athenians refused to continue to fight in the Ionian Revolt and returned to Athens. Because of their participation in this battle, however, the Persian king, Darius, swore vengeance on Athens and commanded a servant to repeat to him three times every day at dinner, “Master, remember the Athenians.” The story is somewhat and probably hypocritically naive (but not necessarily on that account false), as the Persians intended expansion into the Balkans all along. They still held parts of Thrace from their previous abortive expedition into Scythia, only stopped when they learned the true size of the country (most of Russia) and the danger of their position in it.

The Ionians fought on, gaining control of Byzantium and the surrounding towns as well as the greater part of Caria and Caunus. They were not, however, alone. In this last phase of the conflict, almost all of Cyprus also rebelled against the Persians. Onesilus, the younger brother of Gorgus, the ruler of Salamis, tried to convince his brother to rebel against Persia and join in the Ionian Revolt. When his brother refused to support the revolt, Onesilus waited until he left Salamis and then shut the city gates on him. Gorgus fled to the Persians while Onesilus took over and convinced the Cyprians to revolt. They then proceeded to lay siege to the city of Amathus.

Herodotus’ account is the best source we have on the events that amounted to a collision between Persia, which was expanding westward, and classical Greece at its peak. Nevertheless, its depictions are often scanty and uncertain, or incomplete. One of the major uncertainties of the Ionian revolt in Herodotus is why it occurred in the first place.
In retrospect the case seems obvious: Persia disputed the Hellenes for control of cities and territories. The Hellenes had either to fight for their freedom or submit. The desirability of these material objects was certainly economic, although considerations of defense and ideology may well have played a part. These are the motives generally accepted today, after long retrospect.

Herodotus apparently knew of no such motives, or if he did, he did not care to analyse history at that level. J D Manville characterizes his approach as the attribution of “personal motivation” to players such as Aristagoras and Histiaeus. In his view, Herodotus “may seem to overemphasize personal motivation as a cause,” but he really does not. We have either to fault Herodotus for his lack of analytical perspicacity or try to find credible reasons in the historical context for actions to which Herodotus gives incomplete explanations.
Manville suggests that the unexplained places mark events in a secret scenario about which Herodotus could not have known, but he records what he does know faithfully. It is up to the historian to reconstruct the secret history by re-interpretation and speculation, a technique often used by historical novelists. Manville puts it forward as history.

The main players are portrayed by Herodotus as naturally hypocritical. They always have an ulterior motive which they go to great lengths to conceal behind persuasive lies. Thus neither Aristagoras nor Histiaeus are fighting for freedom, nor do they cooperate or collaborate. Each has a personal motive related to greed, ambition, or fear. Manville fills in the uncertainties with hypothetical motives. Thus he arrives, perhaps less credibly for his invention, at a behind-the-scenes struggle for dominance between Aristagoras and Histiaeus. They can best be described as rivals or even enemies. Some of the high points of the argument are as follows.
While Histiaeus was away serving Darius, Aristagoras acted in his stead as deputy of Miletus where, it is argued, he worked on securing his own power. The word for deputy is epitropos, which he was when the Naxian deputation arrived. By the time the fleet departs for Naxos, Aristagoras has promoted himself to “tyrant of Miletus.” There is no explicit statement that he asked Histiaeus’ permission or was promoted by Histaeus. Instead, Aristagoras turned to Artaphernes, who was said to be jealous of Histiaeus. It is true that Artaphernes would not move without consulting the Great King, and that the latter's advisor on Greek affairs was Histiaeus. However, Manville sees a coup by Aristagoras, presuming not only that the Great King's advisor did not advise, but was kept in the dark about his own supersession.

When the expedition failed, Histiaeus sent his tattooed slave to Aristagoras, not as encouragement to revolt, but as an ultimatum. Manville provides an underlying value system to fill in the gap left by Herodotus: revolt was so unthinkable that Histiaeus could bring the fantasies of his opponent back to reality by suggesting that he do it, a sort of “go ahead, commit suicide.” Histiaeus was, in Manville's speculation, ordering Aristagoras to give up his rule or suffer the consequences. Apparently, he was not being kept in the dark by the king after all. Manville leaves us to guess why the king did not just crush the revolt by returning the supposedly loyal Histiaeus to power.

However, at this time Histiaeus was still required to remain in Susa and, despite his threat, he was unable to do anything if Aristagoras did revolt. Realizing that this would be his last chance to gain power Aristagoras started the revolt despite Histiaeus’ threat. This is a surprise to Manville's readers, as we thought he already had power via a coup. Manville does note the contradiction mentioned above, that Aristagoras gave up tyranny, yet was able to force democracy on the other cities and command their obedience to him. We are to see in this paradox a strategy to depose Histiaeus, whom we thought was already deposed.
The tale goes on to an attempt by Histiaeus to form an alliance with Artaphernes to depose the usurper and regain his power at Miletus. Artaphernes, though he was involved in open war with Aristagoras, refuses. The tale told by Manville thus contains events related by Herodotus supplemented by non-events coming from Manville's imagination.

John Myres, classical archaeologist and scholar, whose career began in the reign of Queen Victoria and did not end until 1954, close friend and companion of Arthur Evans, and intelligence officer par excellence of the British Empire, developed a theory of the Ionian Revolt that explains it in terms of the stock political views of the empire, balance of power and power vacuum. Those views, still generally familiar, assert that peace is to be found in a region controlled by competing geopolitical powers, none of which are strong enough to defeat the others. If a power drops from the roster for any reason, a “vacuum” then exists, which causes violent competition until the balance is readjusted.

In a key article of 1906, while Evans was excavating Knossos, the Ottoman Empire had lost Crete due to British intervention, and questions of the “sick man of Europe” were being considered by all the powers, referring to the failing Ottoman Empire and the power vacuum that would be left when it fell, the young Myres published an article studying the balance of what he termed “sea-power” in the eastern Mediterranean in classical times. The word "sea-power" was intended to define his “thalassocracy.”

Myres was using sea-power in a specifically British sense for the times. The Americans had their own idea of sea power, expressed in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s great strategic work, ‘’The Influence of Sea Power upon History’’. which advocated maintaining a powerful navy and using it for strategic purposes, such as “command of the sea,” a kind of domination. The United States Naval Academy used this meaning for its motto, ‘’ex scientia tridens’’, “sea-power through knowledge.” It named one of its buildings, Mahan Hall.

Far different is Myres’ “sea-power” and the meaning of thalassocracy, which means “rule of the seas.“ In contrast to “tridens,” rule of the seas is not a paternalistic but democratic arrangement. Where there are rulers, there are the ruled. A kind of exclusivity is meant, such as in Rule, Britannia!. Specifically, in a thalassocracy, the fleets of the ruler may go where they will and do as they please, but the ruled may go nowhere and engage in no operation without express permission of the ruler. You need a license, so to speak, to be on ruled waters, and if you do not have it, your ships are attacked and destroyed. “Shoot on sight” is the policy. And so Carthaginian ships sank any ships in their waters, etc.

Thalassocracy was a new word in the theories of the late 19th century, from which some conclude it was a scholarly innovation of the times. It was rather a resurrection of a word known from a very specific classical document, which Myres calls “the List of Thalassocracies.” It occurs in the Chronicon of Eusebius, the early 4th century Bishop of Caesarea Maritima, the ruins now in Israel. In Eusebius, the list is a separate chronology. Jerome, 4th-century theologian and historian, creator of the Vulgate, interspersed the same items, translated into Latin, in his Chronicon of world events. The items contain the words “obtinuerunt mare,” strictly speaking, “obtained the sea,” and not “hold sea power,” although the latter meaning may be implied as a result. Just as Jerome utilized the chronology of Eusebius, so Eusebius utilized the chronology of Castor of Rhodes, a 1st-century BC historian. His work has been entirely lost except for fragments, including his list of thalassocracies. A thousand years later, the Byzantine monk, George Syncellus, also used items from the list in his massive "Extract of Chronography".

Over the centuries the realization grew that all these references to sea-power in the Aegean came from a single document, a resource now reflected in the fragments of those who relied on it. C Bunsen, whose translator was one of the first to use thalassocracy, attributed its discovery to the German scholar, Christian Gottlob Heyne In a short work composed in 1769, published in 1771, Eusebius’ Chronicon being known at that time only through fragments in the two authors mentioned, Heyne reconstructed the list in their Greek and Latin (with uncanny accuracy), the whole title of the article being "Super Castoris epochis populorum thalattokratesanton H.E. (hoc est) qui imperium maris tenuisse dicuntur", “About Castor's epochs of thalattocratizing peoples; that is, those who are said to have held the imperium over the sea.” To thalattokratize is “to rule the sea,” not just to hold sea power like any other good fellow with a strong navy. The thalattokratizer holds the imperium over the watery domain just as if it were a country, which explains how such a people can “obtain” and “have” the sea. The list presented therefore is one of successive exclusive domains. No two peoples can hold the same domain or share rule over it, although they can operate under the authority of the thalassocrat, a privilege reserved for paying allies.

According to Bunsen, the discovery and translation of the Armenian version of Eusebius’ Chronicon changed the nature of the search for thalassocracy. It provided the original document, but there was a disclaimer attached, that it was in fact “an extract from the epitome of Diodorus,” meaning Diodorus Siculus, a 1st-century BC historian. The disclaimer cannot be verified, as that part of Diodorus’ work is missing, which, however, opens the argument to another question: if Eusebius could copy a standard source from Diodorus, why cannot Diodorus have copied it from someone else?

It is at this point that Myres picks up the argument. Noting that thalassokratesai, “be a thalassokrat,” meaning “rule the waves,” was used in a number of authors: elsewhere by Diodorus, by Polybius, 2nd century BC historian, of Carthage, of Chios by Strabo, 1st century BC geographer and some others, he supposes that s stock document might have been available to them all (but not necessarily, the cautious Myres points out). The document can be dated by its content: a list of 17 thalassocracies extending from the Lydian after the fall of Troy to the Aeginetan, which ended with the cession of power to Athens in 480 BC. The Battle of Salamis included 200 new Athenian triremes plus all the ships of its new ally, Aegina. Despite various revolts Aegina went on to become part of the Delian League, an imperial treaty of the new Athenian thalassocracy. Thucydides writes of it after 432 BC, but Herodotus, who visited Athens “as late as 444 B.C.” does not know a thing about it. This tentative date for the Eusebian list does not exclude the possibility of an earlier similar document used by Herodotus.

The order of thalassocracies in the various versions of the list is nearly fixed, but the dates need considerable adjustment, which Myres sets about to reconcile through all historical sources available to him. He discovers some gaps. The solidest part of the list brackets the Ionian Revolt. The Milesian thalassocracy is dated 604-585 BC. It was ended by Alyattes of Lydia, founder of the Lydian Empire, who also fought against the Medes. The latter struggle was ended by the Eclipse of Thales at the Battle of the Halys River in 585 BC, when the combatants, interpreting the phenomenon as a sign, made peace. The Lydians were now free to turn on Miletus, which they did for the next 11 years, reducing it. When the Persians conquered Lydia in 547/546 they acquired the Ionian cities.

After 585 is a gap in the list. Lesbos and one or more unknown thalassocrats held the sea in unknown order. In 577 began the thalassocracy of Phocaea. Breaking out of its Anatolian cage, it founded Marseilles and cities in Spain and Italy, wresting a domain away from Carthage and all other opponents. Their thalassocracy ended when, in the revolt of the Lydian Pactyas, who had been instructed to collect taxes by the Persians, but used them to raise an army of revolt, the Ionian cities were attacked by the Persians. The Phocaeans abandoned Phocaea about 534 BC and after much adventuring settled in the west.

The thalassocracy of Samos spans the career of the tyrant, Polycrates, there. The dates of the tyrant are somewhat uncertain and variable, but at some time prior to 534 BC, he and his brothers staged a coup during a festival at Samos. Samos happened to have a large navy of pentekonters. Becoming a ship collector, he attacked and subdued all the neighbouring islands, adding their ships to his fleet. Finally he added a new model, the trireme. His reign came to an end about 517 BC when, taking up the Great King's invitation to a friendly banquet for a discussion of prospects, he was suddenly assassinated. There were no prospects.

However, if he had chosen not to attend, he was doomed anyway. Some of his trireme captains, learning of a devious plot by him to have them assassinated by Egyptian dignitaries while on official business, sailed to Sparta to beg help, which they received. The adventurous young king, Cleomenes I, was spared the trouble of killing Polycrates, but led an expedition to Samos anyway, taking the thalassocracy for two years, 517-515. Adventure and piracy not being activities approved by the Spartan people, they tagged him as insane and insisted he come home. The sea was now available to Naxos, 515-505.

The Hellenes had obtained a foothold on the coast of Anatolia by siding with rebel coastal Anatolian states against the Hittite Empire. Their position was made more solid by the fall of Troy against a coalition of mainland Greek kings. The coastal cities managed to retain their positions against the subsequent Phrygian invasion of Anatolia by joining with the rump Anatolian states, while the Hittites withdrew into neo-Hittite states in Syria. The coastal cities, now entirely Hellenic, continued to receive immigrants from mainland Greece.

The massive transfer of Persian-speaking population from the steppes of Central Asia to the range they now occupy presented the Anatolian Hellenes with an impossible strategic problem. They could not hope to oppose their small armies against the resources of the vast Persian empire unless they could once again receive major support from the mainland Greek states, especially the maritime power of Athens. Those states, however, were reluctant to take on the might of ancient Persia.

Consequently, the Hellenic states in Anatolia submitted reluctantly to Persian rule, and were placed in the new satrapy of Lydia, with capital at Sardis. The satrap of Lydia allowed self-rule as long as taxes were paid and the supremacy of ancient Persia was granted. Many of the Anatolian cities proved loyal subjects. However, underlying resentment against Persian rule was universal.

Persia was not interested in the status quo. Their desire to expand to the west brought them into conflict with Ionia over the question of self-rule, one of the principles of the agreement of the city-states to submit. Their interference in Miletus was the spark that set off the Ionian revolt. Aristagoras, the first rebel ruler, appeared then as the champion of Greek freedom. The Ionians had high hopes of independence.

Due to the disparity in resources and the reluctance of the mainland states to involve themselves, the tide soon turned in favour of the Persians. After only one year, the Cyprians were once again forced into submission by Persia. The cities around the Hellespont fell one after another to Daurises, the son-in-law of king Darius. The Carians fought the Persians at the Maeander River and were defeated with severe casualties.

Aristagoras, seeing the rebellion falling to pieces around him, and little help forthcoming from the Greeks, began looking for a shelter to which he could execute a strategic retreat. He and his men resolved on Myrcinus in Thrace, which had been an Ionian stronghold in the abortive Persian invasion of Scythia. He put Pythagoras, “a man of distinction,” in charge of Miletus and set sail for Thrace, where he attempted to establish a colony on the Strymon river, at the same site as the later Athenian colony of Amphipolis.

The Thracians, not now disposed to tolerate any further presence of Greeks in their country, opposed this incursion. He gained control of the territory but later, while besieging a neighbouring town, Aristagoras was killed in battle.

Expecting a swift Persian victory, Aristagoras had hoped to establish a redoubt of Ionians, who would come to the assistance of Miletus at a later time. By an accidental sequence of historical events his reputation drew the ire of his main historian, Herodotus of Halicarnassus, an Ionian partisan, to such a degree that it suffers yet. Although a champion of freedom, Aristagoras is the only man in all his "histories" that Herodotus openly calls a coward, blaming his supposed flight for the defeat of the revolt. The revolt apparently intensified and spread into the islands. Aristagoras had no way of knowing that he would have been in the van of it, or that the Thracians would not allow a redoubt.

The revolt was over by 494/493 BC. Going directly for Miletus in 494, the Persians defeated the Ionians with their own weapon, the ship, in the Battle of Lade, an island off Miletus. The city was then subject to a siege and the war lost at its fall. Although there was some mild devastation of rebel cities (except for Miletus, which was razed and the population decimated and transported), the Persians were interested in ruling rather than revenge. They began to plan forthwith for the largest invasion of Greece yet undertaken, executed starting 490 BC in a series of conflicts called the Greco-Persian Wars, which are yet famous. Unfortunately for the Persians, they were forced to adopt contingents of Ionian Greeks into their armies and navies.

Most of the information on Aristagoras and his actions comes from the writings of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. On the one hand he is virtually the only literary source for the events he presents as history. While in many ways he reflects some of the best of ancient historiography, on the other hand, his work is sprinkled with motivational and logical lacunae, creating textual paradoxes everywhere, causing some scholars to be critical of his value as a historical source, especially regarding the Ionian Revolt. For purposes of this presentation, textual criticism may be polarized into two camps: the cynical, discrediting Herodotus as an unreliable source, and the affirmative, which credits him with being reliable as far as he goes.

Manville's cynical view concerning an imaginary power struggle between Aristagoras and Histiaeus isolated from the usual contexts of war and society has already been mentioned above. Manville has no confidence in Herodotus' ability to relate connected history and therefore supplies connections for him out of his own speculations. He was preceded in this method by the earlier work of Mabel Lang. A 1968 article by Lang focuses on the paradoxes of the Ionian revolt. For example, Histiaeus originally won the Great King's favor by protecting his escape from Scythia over a key bridge of the Danube. Despite this vital rescue to save the king and all his forces, he shortly after plots a rebellion!

Lang suggests that one might conclude to an ulterior motive at the bridge, "to ingratiate himself with Darius so that he could be on the inside of the king's policy." Apparently, to be on the inside of his policy he has to save his life and the lives of all his army by letting him escape from the large Scythian army not far behind. He prefers to keep him alive for nothing more serious than keeping an eye on him. Nonchalantly Lang writes: "Presumably revolt was already in the air..." It could not have been far in the air if Histiaeus passed up a chance for total victory at the outset, a prized goal of many a lightning campaign in world history afterwards.

The basic problem is Lang's cynicism: "we should not hope to discover the truth about the result merely by accepting the narrative..." Accordingly, she rehearses a catalogue of paradoxes similar to Manville's weaving her own fantasy of unattested events to contain it. Her explanation of why such a tale is necessary is similarly speculative: "the failure of the revolt not only gave prominence to every aspect and event which would explain, justify or anticipate the disastrous results but also cast into the shade any intentions which deserved a better fate and any temporary successes during the course of the war." Not having any other account with which to compare these events, she cannot possibly know that.

The cynical view described above reflects a difference in expectation between Herodotus and his target audiences, which by the accidents of time are multiple and various. He did not write for us moderns. Reading that he was the first historian whose work survived in anything more than scattered fragments, we expect him to have the proper concern of modern historians for continuity and causality, which other ancient historians, such as Thucydides, have. Herodotus is not one of those. With regard to causation, the Cambridge Ancient History article asserts: “...Herodotus does not seem to have innovated: he merely accepted the causation appropriate to his subject and period.”

It would be convenient to attribute this unconcern to a sort of intermediate phase between mythology and history, as many do. Such a view is neglectful of the ravages of time. Herodotus was not the first historian in any way, only the first whose work survived. He wrote of the Ionian Revolt a full generation after it happened; moreover, he was not a participant. He relied on the work of several previous historians at Miletus, of which fragments and mention have survived, chief of which was Hecataeus of Miletus.

Herodotus apparently designed his work according to a specific plan and style. Whether the previous historians used it is not known, due to the paucity of evidence, but it seems unlikely. He appears to use Hecataeus as a framework for his historical events. The fragments of Hecataeus suggest that he wrote only an annal-like sequence long on names and events but short on connecting narrative. To this framework Herodotus adds the logoi, or independent anecdotes of persons and events derived from independent oral traditions, which Herodotus obtained by interview with record-keepers and state historians. The disconnectedness comes from their being independent. It is pointless, therefore, to try to invent connections.

The ancient historians have therefore invented a special category for Herodotus, that he was a logographer, or teller of logoi, based on his own characterization of his sources as logopoioi, “story makers.” Usually the logographers include Hecataeus and the other historians of his generation, who lived through the revolt. There is little evidence of their logography. Whether Herodotus stands alone or is part of a Milesian tradition is a matter of speculation.

Validation of Herodotus therefore rests on validation of his logoi. There is no general validation, but the much-desired archaeological and inscriptional evidence appears to validate a few events as far as they go: some names, circumstances of war, and similar peripheral facts. He cannot be validated as a modern historian, but he does have an overall design, which is “Biblical” or “Bible-like” in scope. He is trying to do an epic in prose similar to the Homerica in verse. His topic is not the Trojan War, but the Graeco-Persian Wars. (The Homerica have been called the pagan Greek “Bible.") Says Oswyn Murray in the Cambridge Ancient History,
It is certainly hard to find fault with his general view that the only adequate explanation for the Persian Wars must be a complete account of relations between the two peoples since the conquest of the Ionian cities in 545 B.C.

In short, Herodotus is personal because the Homerica are personal. Both genres intend to portray the illustrious or non-illustrius deeds and doings of persons in the contexts of mighty wars. Thus Aristagoras personally can be called a “coward.” The lying that they do is metis, “cunning,” an admired Greek virtue practised by the greatest hero of them all, the crafty Odysseus. The literary tradition of it went on. Virgil could include the half-line Timeo Graecos dona ferentes, “I fear Greeks bearing Gifts,” in the Aeneid.

The expectation of modernity in Herodotus is misplaced. Validation must be sought for individual logoi. The whole work or any part of it cannot logically be condemned on the basis of one or a group of paradoxes. All scepticism must have a reason for doubting. The inconsistencies of Herodotus are not a valid reason, which is generally true. But few stories are ever free of inconsistency, and if they are, they are suspect on that account (“too good to be true”).

Denials of Herodotus' validity, from mild to severe, although widespread, were never universal. As an example of ancient information generally agreed to be invalid, many works attributed to various authors have been placed in the "pseudo-" category after as much as centuries of review. There was never any such universal and long-standing denial of Herodotus. On the contrary, the main events, such as the Battles of Marathon and Thermopylae, have been accepted as basically credible by many scholars of many ages. It is therefore misplaced to speak of the "rehabilitation" of Herodotus in medical or neo-ideologic terms.

Accordingly, the most sanguine view treats his work as though no problems exist regarding it. Referring to the Cambridge Ancient History article on the Ionian Revolt by Murray, Georges addresses "the question of Herodotus' veracity and reliability." Repeating Murray's criticism that "the traditions concerning the revolt itself are... fragmented into individual episodes of folly, treachery, or heroism" and therefore are not "trustworthy materials for the history of the revolt," he asserts to the contrary that "Herodotus' account furnishes the material for a coherent and credible account of the actions and events it presents..."

Having said this, Georges must now show that, rather than being paradoxical, Herodotus is coherent and credible. Like Lang, having no other account to offer, he must make his demonstrations from the text of Herodotus, which he spends the rest of the article doing, disputing most of Murray's interpretations. The contradictions are not to be viewed as contradictions. He does not address the question of why, if they are not so, it is necessary to spend an article in disputation over them. The result is a new set of speculations fully as imaginary as Murray's, not being based on any alternative texts.

There is hope, however, as fragments of Greek texts and inscriptions continue to be discovered. Meanwhile, it seems common knowledge that the public of any age is not going to relinquish credibility in Herodotus' great depiction of the Persian Wars.


Is the Asian black bear the same as a Sun Bear?

Biologically and morphologically, Asiatic black bears represent the beginning of the arboreal specializations attained by sloth bears and sun bears. Asiatic black bears have karyotypes nearly identical to those of the five other ursine bears, and, as is typical in the genus, they have 74 chromosomes. From an evolutionary perspective, Asiatic black bears are the least changed of Old World bears, with certain scientists arguing that it is likely that all other lineages of ursine bear stem from this species. Scientists have proposed that Asiatic black bears are either a surviving, albeit modified, form of "Ursus etruscus", specifically the early, small variety of the Middle Villafranchian (Upper Pliocene to Lower Pleistocene) or a larger form of "Ursus minimus", an extinct species that arose 4,000,000 years ago. With the exception of the age of the bones, it is often difficult to distinguish the remains of "Ursus minimus" with those of modern Asiatic black bears.

Asian black bear

The Asian black bear ("Ursus thibetanus", previously known as "Selenarctos thibetanus"), also known as the moon bear and the white-chested bear, is a medium-sized bear species native to Asia and largely adapted to arboreal life. It lives in the Himalayas, in the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent, Korea, northeastern China, the Russian Far East, the Honshū and Shikoku islands of Japan, and Taiwan. It is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), mostly because of deforestation and hunting for its body parts.

The species is morphologically very similar to some prehistoric bears, and is thought by some scientists to be the ancestor of other extant bear species (aside from pandas and spectacled bears). Although largely herbivorous, Asian black bears can be very aggressive toward humans, who frequently trap or kill them for traditional medicine.

Asiatic black bears are black and have a light brown muzzle. They are white on the chin, and have a distinct white patch on the chest, which sometimes has the shape of a V. Their ears are bell shaped, proportionately longer than those of other bears, and stick out sideways from the head. The tail is long.
Adults measure at the shoulder, and in length. Adult males weigh with an average weight of about. Adult females weigh, and large ones up to.

Asiatic black bears are similar in general appearance to brown bears, but are more lightly built and are more slender limbed. The lips and nose are larger and more mobile than those of brown bears. The skulls of Asiatic black bears are relatively small, but massive, particularly in the lower jaw. Adult males have skulls measuring in length and in width, while female skulls are long and wide. Compared to other bears of the genus "Ursus", the projections of the skull are weakly developed; the sagittal crest is low and short, even in old specimens, and does not exceed more than 19–20% of the total length of the skull, unlike in brown bears, which have sagittal crests comprising up to 41% of the skull's length.

Although mostly herbivorous, the jaw structure of Asiatic black bears is not as specialized for plant eating as that of pandas: Asian black bears have much narrower zygomatic arches, and the weight ratio of the two pterygoid muscles is also much smaller in Asian black bears. The lateral slips of the temporal muscles are thicker and stronger in black bears.

A black bear with broken hind legs can still climb effectively. In contrast to polar bears, Asiatic black bears have powerful upper bodies for climbing trees, and relatively weak hind legs which are shorter than those in brown bears and American black bears. They are the most bipedal of all bears, and have been known to walk upright for over a quarter mile. The heel pads on the forefeet are larger than those of most other bear species. Their claws, which are primarily used for climbing and digging, are slightly longer on the fore foot (30–45 mm) than the back (18–36 mm), and are larger and more hooked than those of the American black bear.

On average, adult Asiatic black bears are slightly smaller than American black bears, though large males can exceed the size of several other bear species.

The famed British sportsman known as the "Old Shekarry" wrote of how a black bear he shot in India probably weighed no less than based on how many people it took to lift its body. The largest Asiatic black bear on record allegedly weighed. Zoo-kept specimens can weigh up to. Although their senses are more acute than those of brown bears, their eyesight is poor, and their hearing range is moderate, the upper limit being 30 kHz.

Asiatic black bears are close relatives to American black bears, with which they share a European common ancestor; the two species are thought to have diverged 3,000,000 years ago, though genetic evidence is inconclusive. Both American and Asiatic species are considered sister taxa and are more closely related to each other than other species of bear. The earliest American black bear fossils, which were located in Port Kennedy, Pennsylvania, greatly resemble the Asiatic species. The first mtDNA study undertaken on Asiatic black bears suggested that the species arose after the American black bears, while a second study could not statistically resolve the branching order of sloth bears and the two black species, suggesting that these three species underwent a rapid radiation event. A third study suggested that American black bears and Asiatic black bears diverged as sister taxa after the sloth bear lineage and before the sun bear lineage. Further investigations on the entire mitochondrial cytochrome b sequence indicate that the divergence of continental and Japanese black bear populations might have occurred when bears crossed the land bridge between the Korean peninsula and Japan 500,000 years ago, which is consistent with paleontological evidence.

Until the Late Pleistocene, two further subspecies ranged across Europe and western Asia. These are "Ursus thibetanus mediterraneus" in western Europe and the Caucasus and "Ursus thibetanus permjak" from eastern Europe, especially the Ural Mountains.

Asiatic black bears are reproductively compatible with several other bear species, and have on occasion produced hybrid offspring. According to Jack Hanna's "Monkeys on the Interstate", a bear captured in Sanford, Florida was thought to have been the offspring of an escaped female Asiatic black bear and a male American black bear, and Scherren's "Some notes on hybrid bears" published in 1907 mentioned a successful mating between an Asiatic black bear and a sloth bear. In 1975, within Venezuela's "Las Delicias" Zoo, a female black bear shared its enclosure with a male spectacled bear, and produced several hybrid descendants. In 2005, a possible black bear–sun bear hybrid cub was captured in the Mekong River watershed of eastern Cambodia. An Asiatic black bear/brown bear hybrid, taken from a bile farm, is housed at the Animals Asia Foundation's China Moon Bear Rescue.

Asiatic black bears are diurnal, though they become nocturnal near human habitations. They may live in family groups consisting of two adults and two successive litters of young. They will walk in a procession of largest to smallest. They are good climbers of rocks and trees, and will climb to feed, rest, sun, elude enemies and hibernate. Some older bears may become too heavy to climb. Half of their life is spent in trees and they are one of the largest arboreal mammals. In the Ussuri territory in the Russian Far East, black bears can spend up to 15% of their time in trees. Asiatic black bears break branches and twigs to place under themselves when feeding on trees, thus causing many trees in their home ranges to have nest-like structures on their tops. Asiatic black bears will rest for short periods in nests on trees standing fifteen feet or higher. Asiatic black bears do not hibernate over most of their range. They may hibernate in their colder, northern ranges, though some bears will simply move to lower elevations. Nearly all pregnant sows hibernate. Black bears prepare their dens for hibernation in mid-October, and will sleep from November until March. Their dens can either be dug out hollow trees (sixty feet above ground), caves or holes in the ground, hollow logs, or steep, mountainous and sunny slopes. They may also den in abandoned brown bear dens. Asiatic black bears tend to den at lower elevations and on less steep slopes than brown bears. Female black bears emerge from dens later than do males, and female black bears with cubs emerge later than barren females. Asiatic black bears tend to be less mobile than brown bears. With sufficient food, Asian black bears can remain in an area of roughly 1–2 sq km, and sometimes even as little as 0.5–1 sq km.

Asiatic black bears have a wide range of vocalizations, including grunts, whines, roars, slurping sounds (sometimes made when feeding) and "an appalling row" when wounded, alarmed or angry. They emit loud hisses when issuing warnings or threats, and scream when fighting. When approaching other bears, they produce "tut tut" sounds, thought to be produced by bears snapping their tongue against the roof of their mouth. When courting, they emit clucking sounds.

Within Sikhote-Alin, the breeding season of black bears occurs earlier than in brown bears, starting from mid June to mid August. Birth also occurs earlier, in mid January. By October, the uterine horns of pregnant females grow to. By late December, the embryos weigh 75 grams. Sows generally have their first litter at the age of three years. Pregnant females generally make up 14% of populations. Similar to brown bears, Asiatic black bears have delayed implantation. Sows usually give birth in caves or hollow trees in winter or early spring after a gestation period of 200–240 days. Cubs weigh 13 ounces at birth, and will begin walking at four days of age, and open their eyes three days later. The skulls of newborn black bear cubs bear great resemblance to those of adult sun bears. Litters can consist of 1–4 cubs, with 2 being the average. Cubs have a slow growth rate, reaching only 2.5 kg by May. Black bear cubs will nurse for 104–130 weeks, and become independent at 24–36 months. There is usually a 2–3 year interval period before females produce subsequent litters. The average lifespan in the wild is 25 years, while the oldest Asian black bear in captivity died at the age of 44.

Asiatic black bears are omnivorous, and will feed on insects, beetle larvae, invertebrates, termites, grubs, carrion, bees, eggs, garbage, mushrooms, grasses, fruits, nuts, seeds, honey, herbs, acorns, cherries, dogwood, and grain. Although herbivorous to a greater degree than brown bears, and more carnivorous than American black bears, Asiatic black bears are not as specialized in their diet as pandas are: while pandas depend on a constant supply of low calorie, yet abundant foodstuffs, black bears are more opportunistic and have opted for a nutritional boom-or-bust economy. They thus gorge themselves on a variety of seasonal high calorie foods, storing the excess calories as fat, and then hibernate during times of scarcity. Black bears will eat pine nuts and acorns of the previous year in the April–May period. In times of scarcity, they enter river valleys to gain access to hazelnuts and insect larvae in rotting logs. From mid-May through late June, they will supplement their diet with green vegetation and fruit. Through July to September, they will climb trees to eat bird cherries, pine cones, vines and grapes. On rare occasions they will eat dead fish during the spawning season, though this constitutes a much lesser portion of their diet than in brown bears. In the 1970s, black bears were reported to kill and eat Hanuman langurs in Nepal. They appear to be more carnivorous than most other bears, including American black bears, and will kill ungulates with some regularity, including domestic livestock. Wild ungulate prey can include muntjacs, serow, takin, wild boar and adult water buffaloes, which they kill by breaking their necks.

Asiatic black bears may be occasionally attacked by tigers and brown bears, although leopards and packs of wolves and dholes can also be threats. Eurasian lynxes are a potential predator of cubs. Black bears usually dominate Amur leopards in physical confrontations in heavily vegetated areas, while leopards are uppermost in open areas, though the outcome of such encounters is largely dependent on the size of the individual animals. Leopards have been known to prey on cubs younger than two years old.

The Asiatic black bear's range overlaps with that of sloth bears in central and southern India, sun bears in Southeast Asia and brown bears in the southern part of the Russian Far East. Ussuri brown bears may attack black bears, though Himalayan brown bears seem to be intimidated by the black species in direct encounters. They will eat the fruit dropped by black bears from trees, as they themselves are too large and cumbersome to climb.

Tigers will occasionally prey on black bears. Russian hunters may occasionally find black bear carcasses showing evidence of tiger predation, and their remains may occur in tiger scats. If they manage to escape a tiger, black bears will attempt to rush up a tree and wait for the tiger to leave, though some tigers will pretend to leave, and wait for the bear to descend. One Manchurian tiger was reported to have lured an Asiatic black bear by imitating the species' mating call. Tigers regularly prey on young bears but adult bears are occasionally taken as well. Black bears are usually safe from tiger attacks once they reach five years of age. Although black bears prefer to avoid tigers, they can be extremely tenacious when attacked: Jim Corbett observed a fight between a tiger and the largest black bear he had ever seen, which resulted in the bear managing to chase off the tiger, despite having half its nose and scalp torn off. However, black bears may be less vulnerable than brown bears to tiger predation, due to their habit of living in hollows or in close set rocks, thus making them harder to pursue. At least one fatal attack on a juvenile bear has been recorded in Jigme Dorji National Park, as Bhutan's tiger populations have begun to colonise higher altitude areas. Black bears may steal tiger kills: Jim Corbett twice saw black bears carry off tiger kills when the latter was absent.

Black bears typically inhabit deciduous forests, deserts, mixed forests and thornbrush forests. They rarely live in elevations of more than. They usually inhabit elevations around in the Himalayas in the summer, and will climb down to in winter. They sometimes occur at sea level in Japan.

The fossil record indicates that black bears once ranged as far west as Germany and France, though the species now occurs very patchily throughout its former range, which is now limited to the Asian continent. Black bears occupy a narrow band from southeastern Iran eastward through Afghanistan and Pakistan, across the foothills of the Himalayas in India, to Myanmar. With the exception of Malaysia, black bears occur in all countries in mainland Southeast Asia. They are absent from much of east-central China, though they have a patchy distribution in the southern and northeastern part of the country. Other population clusters exist in the southern Russian Far East and into North Korea. South Korea has a small remnant population. Black bears also occur in Japan's islands of Honshu and Shikoku and on Taiwan and Hainan.

There is no definitive estimate as to the number of Asiatic black bears: Japan posed estimates of 8–14,000 bears living on Honshū, though the reliability of this is now doubted. Although their reliability is unclear, rangewide estimates of 5–6,000 bears have been presented by Russian biologists. In 2012, Japanese Ministry of the Environment estimated the population at 15–20,000. Rough density estimates without corroborating methodology or data have been made in India and Pakistan, resulting in the estimates of 7–9,000 in India and 1,000 in Pakistan. Unsubstantiated estimates from China give varying estimates between 15–46,000, with a government estimate of 28,000.

Wildlife Trust of Bangladesh conducted an on field survey of bears in Bangladesh from 2008–2010 that included Asiatic black Bears. The survey was done in 87 different places mostly in north-central, north eastern and south eastern area of Bangladesh that had historical presence of bears. The survey result says that most of the areas still has some isolated small bear populations mainly the Asiatic black bears. According to the survey the most evidence found relating bears were of Asiatic black bears that included nests, footprints, local sighting etc. There are many reports on the presence of Asiatic black bears in central, north-central, north eastern and south eastern parts of Bangladesh.

Although Asiatic black bears still occurs in different parts of the country mainly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the population is very low in number. The survey also fears that Asiatic black bears will soon be extinct from Bangladesh if necessary steps are not taken in near future.

Three subspecies of Asiatic black bear occur in China: the Tibetan subspecies ("U. thibetanus thibetanus"), the Si Chuan subspecies ("U. thibetanus mupinensis"), and the northeastern subspecies ("U. thibetanus ussuricus"), which is the only subspecies of bear in northeastern China. Asiatic black bears are mainly distributed in the conifer forests in the cold and temperate zones of northeast China, the main areas being Chang Bai, Zhang Guangcai, Lao Ye, and the Lesser Xingan Mountains. Within Liaoning province, there are about 100 black bears, which only inhabit the five counties of Xin Bin, Huan Ren, Ben Xi, Kuan Dian, and Fen Cheng. Within Jilin province, black bears occur mainly in the counties of Hunchun, Dun Hua, Wangqing, An Tu, Chang Bai, Fu Song, Jiao He, Hua Dian, Pan Shi, and Shu Lan. In Heilongjiang province, Asiatic black bears occur in the counties of Ning An, BaYan, Wu Chang, Tong He, Bao Qing, Fu Yuan, Yi Chun, Tao Shan, Lan Xi, Tie Li, Sun Wu, Ai Hui, De Du, Bei An, and Nen Jiang. This population has a northern boundary of about 50° N and the southern boundary in Feng Cheng is about 40°30" N.

In Russia, the black bear's northern range runs from Innokenti Bay on the coast of the Sea of Japan southwest to the elevated areas of Sikhote Alin crossing it at the sources of the Samarga River. At this point, the boundary directs itself to the north, through the middle course of the Khor, Anyui and Khungari rivers, and comes to the shore of the Amur, crossing the it at the level of the mouth of the Gorin. Along the Amur river, the species' presence has been noted as far as 51° N. Lat. From there, the territorial boundary runs southwest of the river's left bank, passing through the northern part of Lake Bolon and the juncture point of the Kur and Tunguska. Black bears are encountered in the Urmi's lower course. Within the Ussuri krai, the species is restricted to broad leaved Manchurian type forests.

In Korea, most of the black bears live in the broad-leaved forest of the alpine region, more than 1,500 meters north of Jirisan. Korean National Park Service announced on April 15, 2018 that eight mother bears gave birth to eleven babies. Six mother bears living in the wild gave birth to eight babies. Two mothers that were being taken care by the nature adaptation training center in Gurye, South Jeolla Province gave birth to three babies. Now there are 56 black bears living in the wild of Jirisan. If the Korea National Park Service release three cubs born in natural adaptation training centers at September this year, the number of black bears living in the wild will increase to 59. As a result, the restoration of the target of 50 black bears, or the minimum remaining population, will be achieved two years earlier. It was a goal by 2020. Their next goal is to expand and improve the habitat and to increase the genetic diversity of the black bears in Mt. Jiri

The Asiatic black bear is listed as a protected animal in China's National Protection Wildlife Law, which stipulates that anyone hunting or catching bears without permits will be subject to severe punishment.

Although the black bear is protected in India, due to being listed as vulnerable in the Red Data Book in Appendix I of CITES in India and in Schedule I of the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act and its 1991 amendment, it has been difficult to prosecute those accused of poaching black bears due to lack of witnesses and lack of Wildlife Forensic Labs to detect the originality of confiscated animal parts or products. Moreover, due to India's wide stretching boundaries with other nations such as Pakistan, Tibet, China, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar, it is difficult to police such borders, which are often in mountainous terrain.

Five black bear populations, occurring in Kyushu, Shikoku, West-Chugoku, East-Chugoku and Kii areas, were listed as endangered by the Environmental Agency in the Japanese Red Data Book in 1991. Small isolated populations in the Tanzawa and Shimokita areas of mainland Honshū were listed as endangered in 1995. Beyond recognising these populations as endangered, there is still a lack of efficient conservation methods for Japanese black bears.

Black bears occur as an infrequent species in the Red Data Book of Russia, thus falling under special protection and hunting is prohibited. There is currently a strong movement to legalize the hunting of Russian black bears, which is supported by most of the local scientific community.

As of January 30, 1989, Taiwan's Formosan black bears have been listed as an endangered species under the Natural and Cultural Heritage Act on, and was later listed as a Conserved Species Category I.

The Vietnamese Government issued Decision 276/QD, 276/1989, which prohibits the hunting and exporting of black bears. The Red Book of Vietnam lists Vietnamese black bears as endangered.

The Korean Government designated the Asian black bear as a Natural Monument No.329 and it is considered as extinction crisis. At present time Endangered Species Restoration Center of Korea National Park Service is going through species restoration business.

The main habitat threat to Chinese black bears is overcutting of forests, largely due to human populations increasing to over 430,000 in regions where bears are distributed, in the Shaanxi, Ganshu, and Sichuan provinces. 27 forestry enterprises were built in these areas between 1950 and 1985 (excluding the lumbering units belonging to the county). By the early 1990s, the black bear distribution area was reduced to only one-fifth of the area that existed before the 1940s. Isolated bear populations face environmental and genetic stress in these circumstances. However, one of the most important reasons for their decrease involves overhunting, as black bear paws, gall bladders and cubs have great economic value. Black bear harvests are maintained at a high level due to the harm they cause to crops, orchards and bee farms. During the 1950s and 1960s, 1000 bears were harvested annually in the Heilongjiang Province. However, purchased furs were reduced by 4/5, even by 9/10 yearly in the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Bears have also been declining annually in Dehong Dai and Jingpo Nations Autonomous Prefecture and the Yunnan Province.

Poaching for gall bladders and skin are the main threat faced by black bears in India. In Pakistan it is listed as an endangered species.

Although the poaching of bears is well known throughout Japan, authorities have done little to remedy the situation. The killing of nuisance bears is practiced year-round, and harvest numbers have been on the increase. Box traps have been widely used since 1970 to capture nuisance bears. It is estimated that the number of shot bears will decrease in time, due to the decline of old traditional hunters and the increase of a younger generation less inclined to hunt. Logging is also considered a threat.

Although black bears have been afforded protection in Russia since 1983, illegal poaching, fuelled by a growing demand for bear parts in the Asian market, is still a major threat to the Russian population. Many workers of Chinese and Korean origin, supposedly employed in the timber industry, are actually involved in the illegal trade. Some Russian sailors reportedly purchase bear parts from local hunters to sell them to Japanese and Southeast Asian clients. Russia's rapidly growing timber industry has been a serious threat to the Asiatic black bear's home range for three decades. The cutting of trees containing cavities deprives black bears of their main source of dens, and forces them to den on the ground or in rocks, thus making them more vulnerable to tigers, brown bears and hunters.

In Taiwan, black bears are not actively pursued, though steel traps set out for wild boars have been responsible for unintentional bear trappings. Timber harvesting has largely stopped being a major threat to Taiwan's black bear population, though a new policy concerning the transfer of ownership of hill land from the government to private interests has the potential to affect some lowland habitat, particularly in the eastern part of the nation. The building of new cross island highways through bear habitat is also potentially threatening.

Vietnamese black bear populations have declined rapidly due to the pressures of human population growth and unstable settlement. Vietnamese forests have been: of the 87,000km2 of natural forests, about 1,000km2 disappear every year. Hunting pressures have also increased with a coinciding decline of environmental awareness.

South Korea remains one of two countries to allow bear bile farming to continue legally. As reported in 2009, approximately 1,374 bears reside in an estimated 74 bear farms where they are kept for slaughter to fuel the demands of traditional Asian medicine. In sharp contrast, fewer than 20 bears can be found at Jirisan Restoration Center, located in Korea's Jirisan National Park.

In Japanese culture, the black bear is traditionally associated with the mountain spirit ("yama no kami") and is characterized variously as "mountain man" ("yamaotoko"), "mountain uncle" ("yama no ossan"), "mountain father" ("yama no oyaji"), a loving mother and a child. Being a largely solitary creature, the bear is also viewed as "lonely person" ("sabishigariya"). Black bears feature very little in lowland Japanese folklore, but are prominent in upland Japan, a fact thought to reflect the bear's greater economic value in upland areas. According to the local folklore in Kituarahara-gun in Niigata, the black bear received its white mark after being given a silk-wrapped amulet by "yama no kami", which left the mark after being removed.
In Hindu mythology, the black bear Jambavantha (also known as Jambavan or Jamvanta) is believed to have lived from Treta Yuga to Dvapara Yuga. In the epic "Ramayana", Jambavantha assists Rama in finding his wife Sita and battle her abductor, Ravana.

Asiatic black bears are briefly mentioned in Yann Martel's novel "The Life of Pi", in which they are described by the protagonist's father as being among the most dangerous animals in his zoo.

Although usually shy and cautious animals, Asiatic black bears are more aggressive toward humans than the brown bears of Eurasia and American black bears. David W. Macdonald theorises that this greater aggression is an adaptation to being sympatric with tigers. According to Brigadier General R.G. Burton:

In response to a chapter on black bears written by Robert Armitage Sterndale in his "Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon" on how black bears were no more dangerous than other animals in India, a reader responded with a letter to "The Asian" on May 11, 1880:

At the turn of the 20th century, a hospital in Srinagar, Kashmir received dozens of black bear victims annually. When black bears attack humans, they rear up on their hind legs and knock victims over with their paws. Then they bite them on an arm or leg and snap on the victim's head, this being the most dangerous part of the attack.
Bear attacks have been increasing in Kashmir since the Kashmir conflict. In November 2009, in the Kulgam district of Indian-administered Kashmir, a black bear attacked four insurgents after discovering them in its den, and killed two of them.

In India, attacks on humans have been increasing yearly, and have occurred largely in the northwestern and western Himalayan region. In the Chamba District of Himachal Pradesh, the number of black bear attacks on humans have gradually increased from 10 in 1988–89 to 21 in 1991–92. There are no records of predation on humans by Asian black bears in Russia and no conflicts have been documented in Taiwan. Recent bear attacks on humans have been reported from Junbesi in Langtang National Park, Nepal, and occurred in villages as well as in the surrounding forest.

Li Guoxing, the second person in history to have received a facial transplant, was a victim of a black bear attack. Nine people were killed by black bears in Japan between 1979–1989. In September 2009, a black bear attacked a group of tourists, mauling nine people and seriously injuring four at a bus station in the built-up area of Takayama, Gifu.
The majority of attacks tend to occur when black bears are encountered suddenly, and in close quarters. Because of this, black bears are generally considered more dangerous than brown bears, which live in more open spaces and are thus less likely to be surprised by approaching humans. They are also likely to attack when protecting food.

On May 7, 2013 in India, a group of bears attacked villages in Orissa, killing eight and injuring "a dozen more". The bears are said to have adopted such aggressive behavior due to excessive consumption of the mahua flower.

2016 saw several attacks by black bears in Japan. In May and June four people were killed by bears in Akita prefecture while picking bamboo shoots, and in August a female safari park worker in Gunma prefecture was killed when a black bear climbed into her car and attacked her. In September a 63-year old fisherman who was also a black belt in karate managed to fight off a black bear attack by destroying its right eye.

In the past, the farmers of the Himalayan lowlands feared black bears more than any other pest, and would erect platforms in the fields, where watchmen would be posted at night and would beat drums to frighten off any interlopers. However, some black bears would grow accustomed to the sound and encroach anyway.

Of 1,375 livestock kills examined in Bhutan, black bears accounted for 8% of attacks. Livestock predation, overall, was greatest in the summer and autumn periods, which corresponded with a peak in cropping agriculture; livestock are turned out to pasture and forest during the cropping season and, subsequently, are less well guarded than at other times.

Livestock killed by black bears in Himachal Pradesh, India increased from 29 in 1988–1989 to 45 in 1992–1993.

In the remoter areas of Japan, black bears can be serious crop predators: black bears feed on cultivated bamboo shoots in spring, on plums, watermelons and corn in the summer, and on persimmons, sweet potatoes and rice in the autumn. Japanese black bears are estimated to damage 3,000 bee hives annually. When feeding on large crops such as watermelons or pumpkins, black bears will ignore the flesh, and eat the seeds, thus adversely affecting future harvests. Black bears can girdle and kill trees by stripping their bark for the sap. This can cause serious economic problems in Asia's valuable timber forests. In the late 1970s, 400-1,200 hectares of land had been affected by bears bark stripping Japanese conifers. There is evidence that 70-year-old conifers (commanding the highest market values) may also have been bark stripped.

Black bears will prey on livestock if their natural food is in poor supply. They have been known to attack bullocks, either killing them outright, or eating them alive.

Along with sun bears, Asiatic black bears are the most typically used species in areas where bears are either used in performances or as pets. Asian black bears have an outstanding learning ability in captivity, and are among the most common species used in circus acts. According to Gary Brown:

Black bears are easily tamed, and can be fed with rice, maize, sweet potato, cassava, pumpkin, ripe fruit, animal fat and sweet foods. Keeping captive black bears is popular in China, especially due to the belief that milking the bear's gall bladder leads to quick prosperity. Bears are also popular as pets in Vietnam.

According to "The great and small game of India, Burma, and Tibet", regarding the hunting of black bears in British India:

The book also describes a second method of black bear hunting involving the beating of small patches of forest, when the bears march out in single file. However, black bears were rarely hunted for sport, because of the poor quality of their fur and the ease by which they could be shot in trees, or stalked, as their hearing was poor.

Although easy to track and shoot, black bears were known by British sportsmen to be extremely dangerous when injured. Brigadier General R.G. Burton wrote of how many sportsmen had been killed by black bears after failing to make direct hits.

Today, black bears are only legally hunted for sport in Japan and Russia. In Russia, 75–100 black bears are legally harvested annually, though 500 a year are reportedly harvested illegally. Russian sport hunting of black bears became legalised in 2004. According to a 2008 article written in "The Sun", Russia's Slavic Hunting Club offers four day trips with four guaranteed black bear kills for the sum of £16,000. The article indicated that clients receiving permits for black bear hunts included people from Britain, the United States, Germany, Spain, Poland and Finland.
After the introduction of Buddhism in Japan, which prohibited the killing of animals, the Japanese compromised by devising different strategies in hunting bears. Some, such as the inhabitants of the Kiso area in the Nagano Prefecture, prohibited the practise altogether, while others developed rituals in order to placate the spirits of killed bears. In some Japanese hunting communities, black bears lacking the white chest mark are considered sacred. In the Akita Prefecture, bears lacking the mark were known by "matagi" huntsmen as "minaguro" (all black) or "munaguro" (black chested), and were also considered messengers of "yama no kami". If such a bear was shot, the huntsman would offer it to "yama no kami", and give up hunting from that time on. Similar beliefs were held in Nagano, where the completely black bears were termed "nekoguma" or cat-bear. "Matagi" communities believed that killing a bear in the mountains would result in a bad storm, which was linked to the belief that bear spirits could affect weather. The "matagi" would generally hunt bears in spring or from late autumn to early winter, before they hibernated. In mountain regions, bears were hunted by driving them upland to a waiting hunter who would shoot it. Bear hunting expeditions were preceded by rituals, and could last up to two weeks. After killing the bear, the "matagi" would pray for the bear's soul. Bear hunts in Japan are often termed "kuma taiji", meaning "bear conquest". The word "taiji" itself is often used in Japanese folklore to describe the slaying of monsters and demons.

Traditionally, the Atayal, Taroko, and Bunun tribes of Taiwan consider black bears to be almost human in their behaviours, and thus unjust killing of bears is equated with murder and will cause misfortunes such as disease, death, or crop failure. The Bunun people call black bears "Aguman" or "Duman" which means devil. Traditionally, a Bunun hunter who has accidentally trapped a bear has to build a cottage in the mountains and cremate the bear within it. The hunter must stay in the cottage alone, away from the village until the end of the millet harvest, as it is believed that the killing of a black bear will cause the millet crop to burn black. In the Tungpu area, black bears are considered animals of the "third category": animals with the most remote relationship to humans and whose activity is restricted outside human settlements. Therefore, when black bears encroach upon human settlements, they are considered ill omens. In this situation, the community can either destroy trespassing bears or settle somewhere else. The Rukai and Paiwan people are permitted to hunt black bears, though they believe that doing so will curse the hunters involved: Rukai people believe that hunting bears can result in disease. Children are forbidden from eating bear meat, which is itself not permitted to be taken within homes.

Accounts on the quality of the black bear's fur vary. According to "Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon", "Their skins are always poor and mangy, and generally so greasy that they are very difficult to keep until you can make them over to the dresser", which is corroborated by "The great and small game of India, Burma, and Tibet", which states "... the skins are never of any particular value, and in autumn, owing to the masses of yellow fat that are accumulated beneath them, are absolutely useless." The first part of volume II of "Mammals of the Soviet Union" on the other hand states that Asian black bears yield fur, meat and fat of greater quality than those of brown bears. In British India, grease was the only practical use for black bear carcasses. Bears living near villages were considered the most ideal, as they were almost invariably fatter than their forest dwelling counterparts.

Asiatic black bears have been hunted for their parts in China since the Stone Age. Bile is most appreciated as it supposedly cures many diseases, effectively treats the accumulation of blood below the skin, and counters toxic effects. Also, bear bone glue is used as a tonic, and bear fat is also used as a traditional medicine and a tonic. Black bear meat is also edible. Due to their many uses black bears are worth about 20–30 million dong (US$1,500–2,250) each in Vietnam.

Asian black bear

The species is morphologically very similar to some prehistoric bears, and is thought by some scientists to be the ancestor of other extant bear species (aside from pandas and spectacled bears). Although largely herbivorous, Asian black bears can be very aggressive toward humans, who frequently trap or kill them for traditional medicine.

Asiatic black bears are black and have a light brown muzzle. They are white on the chin, and have a distinct white patch on the chest, which sometimes has the shape of a V. Their ears are bell shaped, proportionately longer than those of other bears, and stick out sideways from the head. The tail is long.
Adults measure at the shoulder, and in length. Adult males weigh with an average weight of about. Adult females weigh, and large ones up to.

Although mostly herbivorous, the jaw structure of Asiatic black bears is not as specialized for plant eating as that of pandas: Asian black bears have much narrower zygomatic arches, and the weight ratio of the two pterygoid muscles is also much smaller in Asian black bears. The lateral slips of the temporal muscles are thicker and stronger in black bears.

On average, adult Asiatic black bears are slightly smaller than American black bears, though large males can exceed the size of several other bear species.

The famed British sportsman known as the "Old Shekarry" wrote of how a black bear he shot in India probably weighed no less than based on how many people it took to lift its body. The largest Asiatic black bear on record allegedly weighed. Zoo-kept specimens can weigh up to. Although their senses are more acute than those of brown bears, their eyesight is poor, and their hearing range is moderate, the upper limit being 30 kHz.

Until the Late Pleistocene, two further subspecies ranged across Europe and western Asia. These are "Ursus thibetanus mediterraneus" in western Europe and the Caucasus and "Ursus thibetanus permjak" from eastern Europe, especially the Ural Mountains.

The Asiatic black bear's range overlaps with that of sloth bears in central and southern India, sun bears in Southeast Asia and brown bears in the southern part of the Russian Far East. Ussuri brown bears may attack black bears, though Himalayan brown bears seem to be intimidated by the black species in direct encounters. They will eat the fruit dropped by black bears from trees, as they themselves are too large and cumbersome to climb.

Black bears typically inhabit deciduous forests, deserts, mixed forests and thornbrush forests. They rarely live in elevations of more than. They usually inhabit elevations around in the Himalayas in the summer, and will climb down to in winter. They sometimes occur at sea level in Japan.

Although Asiatic black bears still occurs in different parts of the country mainly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the population is very low in number. The survey also fears that Asiatic black bears will soon be extinct from Bangladesh if necessary steps are not taken in near future.

The Asiatic black bear is listed as a protected animal in China's National Protection Wildlife Law, which stipulates that anyone hunting or catching bears without permits will be subject to severe punishment.

Five black bear populations, occurring in Kyushu, Shikoku, West-Chugoku, East-Chugoku and Kii areas, were listed as endangered by the Environmental Agency in the Japanese Red Data Book in 1991. Small isolated populations in the Tanzawa and Shimokita areas of mainland Honshū were listed as endangered in 1995. Beyond recognising these populations as endangered, there is still a lack of efficient conservation methods for Japanese black bears.

Black bears occur as an infrequent species in the Red Data Book of Russia, thus falling under special protection and hunting is prohibited. There is currently a strong movement to legalize the hunting of Russian black bears, which is supported by most of the local scientific community.

As of January 30, 1989, Taiwan's Formosan black bears have been listed as an endangered species under the Natural and Cultural Heritage Act on, and was later listed as a Conserved Species Category I.

The Vietnamese Government issued Decision 276/QD, 276/1989, which prohibits the hunting and exporting of black bears. The Red Book of Vietnam lists Vietnamese black bears as endangered.

The Korean Government designated the Asian black bear as a Natural Monument No.329 and it is considered as extinction crisis. At present time Endangered Species Restoration Center of Korea National Park Service is going through species restoration business.

Poaching for gall bladders and skin are the main threat faced by black bears in India. In Pakistan it is listed as an endangered species.

Vietnamese black bear populations have declined rapidly due to the pressures of human population growth and unstable settlement. Vietnamese forests have been: of the 87,000km2 of natural forests, about 1,000km2 disappear every year. Hunting pressures have also increased with a coinciding decline of environmental awareness.

South Korea remains one of two countries to allow bear bile farming to continue legally. As reported in 2009, approximately 1,374 bears reside in an estimated 74 bear farms where they are kept for slaughter to fuel the demands of traditional Asian medicine. In sharp contrast, fewer than 20 bears can be found at Jirisan Restoration Center, located in Korea's Jirisan National Park.

Asiatic black bears are briefly mentioned in Yann Martel's novel "The Life of Pi", in which they are described by the protagonist's father as being among the most dangerous animals in his zoo.

Although usually shy and cautious animals, Asiatic black bears are more aggressive toward humans than the brown bears of Eurasia and American black bears. David W. Macdonald theorises that this greater aggression is an adaptation to being sympatric with tigers. According to Brigadier General R.G. Burton:

In response to a chapter on black bears written by Robert Armitage Sterndale in his "Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon" on how black bears were no more dangerous than other animals in India, a reader responded with a letter to "The Asian" on May 11, 1880:

On May 7, 2013 in India, a group of bears attacked villages in Orissa, killing eight and injuring "a dozen more". The bears are said to have adopted such aggressive behavior due to excessive consumption of the mahua flower.

2016 saw several attacks by black bears in Japan. In May and June four people were killed by bears in Akita prefecture while picking bamboo shoots, and in August a female safari park worker in Gunma prefecture was killed when a black bear climbed into her car and attacked her. In September a 63-year old fisherman who was also a black belt in karate managed to fight off a black bear attack by destroying its right eye.

In the past, the farmers of the Himalayan lowlands feared black bears more than any other pest, and would erect platforms in the fields, where watchmen would be posted at night and would beat drums to frighten off any interlopers. However, some black bears would grow accustomed to the sound and encroach anyway.

Of 1,375 livestock kills examined in Bhutan, black bears accounted for 8% of attacks. Livestock predation, overall, was greatest in the summer and autumn periods, which corresponded with a peak in cropping agriculture; livestock are turned out to pasture and forest during the cropping season and, subsequently, are less well guarded than at other times.

Livestock killed by black bears in Himachal Pradesh, India increased from 29 in 1988–1989 to 45 in 1992–1993.

Black bears will prey on livestock if their natural food is in poor supply. They have been known to attack bullocks, either killing them outright, or eating them alive.

Along with sun bears, Asiatic black bears are the most typically used species in areas where bears are either used in performances or as pets. Asian black bears have an outstanding learning ability in captivity, and are among the most common species used in circus acts. According to Gary Brown:

Black bears are easily tamed, and can be fed with rice, maize, sweet potato, cassava, pumpkin, ripe fruit, animal fat and sweet foods. Keeping captive black bears is popular in China, especially due to the belief that milking the bear's gall bladder leads to quick prosperity. Bears are also popular as pets in Vietnam.

According to "The great and small game of India, Burma, and Tibet", regarding the hunting of black bears in British India:

The book also describes a second method of black bear hunting involving the beating of small patches of forest, when the bears march out in single file. However, black bears were rarely hunted for sport, because of the poor quality of their fur and the ease by which they could be shot in trees, or stalked, as their hearing was poor.

Although easy to track and shoot, black bears were known by British sportsmen to be extremely dangerous when injured. Brigadier General R.G. Burton wrote of how many sportsmen had been killed by black bears after failing to make direct hits.