Lions in Europe

No reason not to believe lions once roamed eastern Europe:

But early-20th-century archaeologists in mainland Greece thought that there might be some truth to the existence of lions in the region in ancient times. Why else would these creatures feature so prominently—and realistically—in art from the late Bronze Age, as well as in myths and actual reports by later scholars from the Classical period, such as Aristotle and Herodotus?

Though such theories were long dismissed by other researchers, in 1978, two prominent German zooarchaeologists made a startling discovery. During an excavation of Tiryns—the same city whose legendary king dared Hercules into action—they chanced upon a feline heel bone near a human skeleton. It was unmistakably from a lion, they concluded, and possibly of the same species that inhabits parts of the African continent today.

The bone was only the first of dozens to surface in Tiryns and elsewhere over the following decades. Though some details remain unclear, many archaeologists and historians now use this evidence to conclude that modern lions once lived alongside people in parts of what is today Europe, including Greece, for hundreds of years. Today lion bones offer a rare glimpse into the Bronze Age world and the fraught relationship that humans had with these fierce predators, animals that inspired legends and creative works for centuries.

“Now it’s possible to say that some [lion images] could have been recalled from real experiences on the [Greek] mainland,” says the art historian Nancy Thomas. The finds, she adds, cast “a whole different light on the art … and how hunting real lions could have played into the elite structure development that was going on in Greece at the time.”

...The fossil record suggests that modern Panthera leo populations were once widespread, stretching from parts of Africa through the Middle East to India. But the route these cats would have taken to reach Europe, whether across the mainland or crossing the Bosporus over an ancient land bridge, remains a mystery. 

Scholars such as Bartosiewicz speculate that lions ventured around the Black Sea into Ukraine, then moved south to the Balkans. From there, some could have roamed farther south to Greece.