It is curious that during the time of the australopithecines, many species of very large and very dangerous carnivores became extinct. The hominines could not have done this directly, so it must have been their cats. But how could a little pussy cat kill a giant hyena or a sabertooth lion? I have been giving this question a lot of thought and I have come up with a scenario in which the Pliocene pussy cats could cause the extinction of large carnivores.

It came to me in a Darwinian flash of inspiration while thinking of Farley Mowat's classic book Never Cry Wolf. In this book he tells about the wolves which everyone had believed lived solely on big game prey. He found that the wolves really lived on mice for most of the year. Let us purpose that the large African carnivores lived in a similar manner. They would feed heavily on large prey animals at certain times of the year, i.e. during grazing animal migration, but for most of the year they would feed exclusively on mice or other rodents. When the Pliocene pussy cat population boomed due to their association with hominids, they simply out competed the larger carnivores by eating all of the mice. Most of the large carnivores died out, leaving only those few species present today who did not feed on rodents.

We see a similar situation today in Australia and New Zealand where imported Holocene pussy cats are in the process of causing mass extinction of the native animals. We need a study of five million year old hyena scats. I am confident that they have a lot of rodent bones and hair in them compared to modern hyena scats.

Copyright © Lorenzo L. Love
August 8, 1998