The big cats that stalked early humans and why ancient concrete outlasts the modern stuff
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What early human threats did saber‑toothed cats pose?
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Hi, this is the science show. I'm Belinda Smith.
This week, a look back at some of the threats humankind has overcome. From questionable Roman construction practices to giant eruptions lobbed from the sun. But we start with threats to our ancient ancestors. The African landscape today features some pretty fearsome and deadly carnivores, lions and, to a lesser extent, leopards. But these predators are nothing on what hominins had to contend with a couple of million years ago. dozens of other carnivores, all of which would look at a nice soft, squishy hominin and think, That's my dinner. Perhaps the best known of these now extinct predators were the saber toothed cats. But not all saber tooths were true saber tooths. So I wanted to know. Who were these ancient long fanged predators?
And why did they all die out? I knew exactly the person to ask. Justin Adams, a paleontologist at Monash University who specializes in African mammals.
The history of cat evolution is pretty complicated, but we have an interesting phenomenon taking place in Africa at the same time that humans are evolving. So there are true sabertooths that are scattered around the entire world two million years ago, Smylodon fatalis being the most iconic of them, because if you ever see any reconstructions of a saber-toothed cat, you'll see these big scimitar-shaped teeth. that are extending well down from their palates, And they are preying on a woolly mammoth.
The presence of true saber-tooths imply the presence of false saber-tooths, and these belong to a separate lineage of carnivore cats, but who independently evolved long canine teeth.
So it's the reason why we use the term false saber tooth, although We'd equally just refer to them as either dirk-toothed cats, so that a dirk is a type of dagger. So it's like a dagger-toothed cat. Or will oftentimes just refer to the genus name, which is Dinophilus, or the terrible cat.
While Dinophilus and other false sabretoothed cats had these big dagger like teeth, they weren't as long as a true sabretoothed canines, nor were they serrated as the true sabertooth's canines were. What does the serration, the the blade like nature of the sabre tooth cat's teeth tell us about how they lived?
You're now getting into the realm of controversy. It's really important to emphasize that there's many, many different interpretations. There's also many, many different saber-toothed cats. So It wasn't probably just one thing that was being done. But One thing that we can say Is that the shape of this tooth is about Базик, максимізін і ценет пова. It's about being able to minimize the amount of contact of surface area. against the surface of an animal. So that it can slide into the animal more easily. But There is an immediate problem that we've got. And that is that this tooth by being very blade like and not like sort of rounded. Means that it can resist certain forces, but is probably more prone to damage from side to side.
Right. So if the animal that you've chumped into just wrenches away, you could snap that tooth
right off. You could snap the tooth. And the longer the tooth The more likelihood of there being risk. So that brings me actually to the other big morphological feature that we see go with true saber tooth that we never actually find in a false saber tooth. One of the things that happens is true saber tooth develop a flange of bone, a tab of bone that sticks down from their jaw. So that when they closed their mouths, they're actually protecting their exaggerated canine. It's almost like, you know, you've got these like nineteenth century mutton chops that are sticking down, except instead of at the jawline, they're down at the chin. And so what that means is that at rest, a saber-toothed cat with her mouth closed would have these long projecting sabers, but there would have been essentially a bone buttress on the inside of that tooth, not the entire extent of the tooth, but really supporting it so that it would have been more protected against injury.
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