Whenever Modern Man, the most feral & rapacious of all animals, first arrived at some new region in the Northern Hemisphere, the sure & early extinction of the, up till then, highly successful Sabre-Toothed Cats occurred. The coincidence is very compelling! Yet, the coming of Homo sapiens did not have the same devasting effect on their also large, but shorter fanged more distant relatives - Lions, Leopards, Tigers & Cheetahs. Clearly there seems to be something different in their niche, their particular mode of hunting, that made them especially vulnerable to the arrival of our species. The long pair of teeth seem to have the clue to what this was.

It is one of the principals of the natural environment, that only one species will occupy one niche. Often this does not appear to be quite true, but when you closely monitor two species which seem to be occupying the one niche, you find small but salient differences which makes their lifestyles distinct. Lions, Leopards, & Cheetahs may often eat the same prey, and occupy the same geographical areas on the East African savannah, but their ways of hunting are quite at variance. Cheetahs run down their prey, after a short stalking. Leopards prefer to approach their prey very closely, so that a rather short pounce is sufficient. Lions differ to the others in often hunting as a team, and moreover, their method involves a stalk & a chase, which places it in between those of the other two. So even when these three cats co-habit the same region, their different styles of hunting means that, even when they take the same prey, such as Thomson's Gazelles, they are catching them in different places - the Cheetahs in the open grassland; the Lions, where there is a mix of open grassland with nearby cover of scrub or long grass; the Leopards, in denser cover. All, however, finish the prey, once it is caught, in same Feline way - a strong long bite on the neck, which closes the windpipe and suffocates the prey.* And they all survived our creation through evolution in Africa, which the Sabre-Toothed Cats did not. This certainly means that the hunting style of the latter was quite distinct.

The generally accepted use by Sabre-Tooth Cats for these long & sharp, but ironically delicate & almost brittle canines, is for giving a different variation of the death bite**. The long canines being used to penetrate the windpipe, jungular vein & main artery in a single penetrating bite. But they were surely rather cumbersome, as well as being somewhat delicate. So why develop this technique, instead of the normal feline death bite? Moreover, if they were hunting the same game as Lions, Cheetahs, Leopards & Tigers, surely the greater dental convenience of the short tooth cats would leave long tooth cats quickly extinct, if they were pursuing the same prey?

The only reasonable explanation, if we are good scientists and apply Ockham's Razor, is that Sabre-Toothed Cats were hunting prey which had necks so thick & well protected, that even a Lion's death bite could do them no real harm! Such animals existed aplenty in the Peistocene Ice-Age! - There was the Elephant Family, which included at that time, also Mammoths & Mastodons. There were also, across Africa, Europe & Asia, Rhinoceros & Hippopotumus of several species, some even larger than those existing today. In the Americas, there were Giant Ground Sloths with similar neck protection. Hunting all these brought good times to the Sabre-Tooth Cats, & as the Herbivores got bigger, so did their particular predators, apexing with the very large Smilodon in the Americas, which continents were an especial Pachyderm paradise.

Well? So what went wrong? - Us!!!

Modern Humans made our mark as big game hunters. Our ancestors had the stone technology to produce spear points which were clearly designed for killing the very large herbivores, and so that is what we did. Being the feral species which we are, once out of Africa & meeting Pachyderms & others unfamiliar with our hunting methods, we fell upon them in an orgy of killing! - In this, as even modern history shows, we are like dogs, in that we habitually kill prey way beyond our food needs, for the simple reason that we can do it & we enjoy doing it. In short, Homo sapiens ate Megafauna as our preferred diet, thus effectively occupying the same niche as the Sabre-Tooth Cats & eliminating them through competition, though we may have directly killed many of them as well. Hunting a large and dangerous predator is a popular of proving ones manhood in many hunter-gatherer and herding societies. Subsistence farmers are usually too busy for such recreations.

When the rapacious & wasteful consumption of the megafauna caused the extinction of most of them, Homo sapiens had to find something else to eat, and did. After all, we are here! However, there was probably an immediate mass starvation & death amongst our mega-hunters, which would have pushed them into a greater caution as to their hunting & culinary methods. But such growth of wisdom is only a temporary ambience for Homo sapiens. History, that ever harsh & wise teacher, which is repeatedly ignored despite the peril, clearly shows this!

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* [This death bite is clearly shown in many wildlife documentaries, with the BBC's "Big Cat Diary" series of the late 1990s, being especially instructive.]

** [This is so, according to the 2001 BBC documentary series, "Walking With Beasts", which more or less insired this harangue. But I have read it elsewhere, albeit my mind can not hold all the reference details. As I really don't have the time to look such things up, and as anyone who disputes this can so do, if they have the time, I feel unconvinced that should even make such an attempt! Such flippancy is the reserve of the amateur haranguer!]

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