my googling skills are waning, all I found was this:

Giant lions were roaming around Britain, Europe and North America up to 13,000 years ago, scientists from Oxford University have found...

...Lions appear to have been very important to early man with many depictions of them in their cave paintings, as in seen in the pre-historic cave complex at Chauvet in France.

continues here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/oxfordshire/7974948.stm