The quintessential sabercat may be Smilodon, but it's importance in terms of our own evolution pales in comparison to another sabercat that hominins shared the landscape with in Africa and Europe: Megantereon. Various hypotheses have been put forward about the relationship of our early ancestors and the extinct cats that they probably often encountered, ranging from providing hominins with a surplus of meat (the logic being that the large canines would have prevented the sabercats from eating much of their kills) to being predators of hominins to even forming a symbiotic relationship with the robust australopithecines where they acted almost like hunting dogs. Indeed, while some of the ideas I just mentioned may be a little far out, there is much we still don't know about the relationship of our ancient relatives to extinct big predators, although the dispersal of Megantereon into Europe may have had some influence on the dispersal of Homo erectus.
As for the photo itself, it was taken at the AMNH and I was surprised at how well it turned out. I opted for black & white, and by ramping up the contrast on the camera and framing the picture right I was able to make the background seem much darker than the skull. What interests me most about the skull itself, though, is how large the nasal opening is in Megantereon and why that should be so.
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Perhaps they were cold adapted? You know, because of all the glaciers rampaging over the African landscape. It was a real problem.
Right, and the whole Neanderthal ice-tool culture was actually started in Africa during that time, we just don't have the actual traces (for obvious reasons). And to think that some people need to use hallucinogens to think these things up... :P
My thoughts are that we are looking at a naturally evolved analog of selectively bred bulldogs. Back when bulldogs were still BULL-dogs and bred for optimal performance in the 'art' of bull-baiting, the upward nose of the dogs allowed them to breathe while firmly holding on to the bull with the jaws. Given that sabertooths might have held similar strategies in taking down megafauna (if I remember one of your recent post's premise correctly) I think the nasals were this large to allow Megantereon to breathe while suffocating its prey.
Ah yes, Megantereon, one of those sabertooth cats that would have definitely interacted with australopithecines and early Homo, and which did cross the Bering Land Bridge early on to the New World. I've read Alan Turner's book The Big Cats and Their Fossil Relatives, and it is likely that the American Megantereon evolved into Smilodon in the Pleistocene.
Personally, I think the most underappreciated sabertooth cat out there is Homotherium. No doubt they bore witness to our evolution, from when we were australopithecines running away from them, to early Homo. Even those Homo that left Africa would have found Homotherium inhabiting Europe and Asia as well. And then when Homo sapiens crossed the Bering into the Americas, hey, there's Homotherium as well! Such a near-cosmopolitan cat, and yet there's still so much we don't know about it. I mean, what's up with the hyena-like body? Was it possibly semi-plantigrade? (??!) What's all those juvenile proboscidean remains doing in that cave with homotheres?
Plus there is the very tantalising possibility that Homotherium actually survived in Late Pleistocene Europe, when it has been commonly believed that all the Old World sabertooths bit the dust by Mid-Pleistocene:
http://darrennaish.blogspot.com/2006/03/late-survival-of-homotherium-co…
Smilodon hogs all the attention. BAH.
Well, obviously Neandertals have been around a lot longer than we really know - on the order of millions of years. They were probably keeping Megantereon as pets and breeding them for large teeth in order to hunt australopithecines for sport.
Having lots of glaciers around would provide great raw material for the Neandertal ice-tool culture.
My sarcasm-o-meter broke down years ago when I discovered the tripe spouted by creationists. Can someone tell me if Melanie is joking, or if this ranks along with the aquatic sabertooth hypothesis?
Hai-Ren, I'm joking. I'm a grad student in evolutionary anthropology at Rutgers and I'm in a hominid evolution class with Brian. We talk like this all the time.
Melanie: AH. My sincere apologies. I had a feeling that you were only joking, but I've become highly sensitised to a lot of the weird ideas some people have where it comes to dealing with extinct or cryptic organisms.
Hai; Indeed, Melanie and I were just talking about some of our in-jokes that we come up with during our seminar class. The gag generally is starting a journal all about crackpot ideas like the bovid tracks at Laetoli really being made by dinosaurs that survived the K/T and converged with antelopes and similar things. Given some of the intellectually fluff floating around on the internet though, I don't blame you for almost taking it seriously.
Hai, no problem, there are a lot of crackpot theories out there, and more crackpots to believe them.
Brian, do you think south African Neandertals were hunting dinosaur-bovids with their ice culture tools? Or perhaps using them as transportation? After all, they had to get to Europe and the Middle East somehow.