If you think racoons are a nuisance, be glad the American lion went extinct some 10,000 years ago.
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00:00If you think raccoons are a nuisance, be glad the American lion went extinct some 10,000
00:05years ago.
00:06Weighing in at around 500 pounds — nearly three times the weight of one of today's
00:09mountain lions — and running about 30 miles per hour, the American lion could seriously
00:14mess you up.
00:15As in, mangle you and flop you around like a blood-soaked rag.
00:19So what happened to the lions?
00:21Don't go blaming humans for this one.
00:23Theory 1 starts, like, 10,000 years ago or so, when humans taught ourselves to throw
00:27a mean spear.
00:28But could a bunch of hide-clad hunters with stone-tipped spears encircle all the megafauna
00:32on the American continent and stab them into extinction?
00:35It stands to reason that some extremely brave, stupid, and or really hungry early North American
00:40humans could have hunted lions.
00:42Given the choice between mastodons, mammoths, giant bears, and dire wolves — which are
00:47real animals and not some George R.R. Martin invention — lions could certainly be near
00:52the bottom of the spear-receiving line.
00:54Yes, it's true that humans could have contributed to the lions' extinction if they killed them
00:58at a fast enough pace.
00:59But humans being totally responsible?
01:01Eh.
01:02As archaeologist David Meltzer — not the wrestling guy, different David Meltzer — proposes,
01:07it wasn't us.
01:08That's one crime we didn't commit.
01:10We're guilty of God knows a million other things, but that's not one of them.
01:14He surely has a point.
01:15If early man spent time hunting lions for a living, we probably wouldn't be here.
01:20However, it is at least possible that human interaction with the delicate balance of the
01:23greater biosphere impacted the long-term survival of the American lion.
01:28Evidence to support this possibility has been found in New Mexico's White Sands National
01:32Park.
01:33Once the glaciers began to melt, the White Sands area became a muddy wetland.
01:37American lion fossils have been found there from well before it became a vast white desert.
01:41And in the same area, fossilized American lion footprints have been discovered around
01:45what was once the edge of Lake Otero, a large freshwater lake that began to dry up 12,000
01:50years ago.
01:51The clay-like mud underneath preserved the prints of animals that came here to drink
01:56and feed on the plants that grew along the shoreline.
01:59Interestingly, we've also got loads of fossilized human footprints in the same region, which
02:04tells us something.
02:05There's evidence of men, women, and children going about their daily tasks, even apparently
02:09stalking a ground sloth.
02:12This was one of the most bizarre-looking megafauna of the Ice Age.
02:16They were strong but slow, and could have been easy targets for Ice Age hunters.
02:22So one of the things that could have led to the lion extinction was the loss of their
02:25diet.
02:26More giant sloth for us, less for the lion.
02:28So theory two is that we out-competed the lion for sustenance.
02:32But the most likely theory, number three if you're scoring at home, had to do with our
02:35old friend climate change.
02:37We don't mean the one that has people throwing soup on paintings.
02:40We're talking about the naturally occurring kind that cycles over Earth's entire history
02:43— an actual change in climate.
02:46Specifically, the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,500 years ago, when rapidly rising
02:51temps melted the glaciers that used to cover 30% of the planet's surface, all the way down
02:56to Illinois and Missouri.
02:58Since then, we've been living in the Holocene Epoch, a very slim sliver of time in the context
03:03of Earth's 4.5 billion year history.
03:05And fun fact, the last Ice Age technically hasn't ended.
03:09We're now in what is called an interglacial period, a period of transition.
03:13So we've got that going for us.
03:15This delicate change in temperature could have been just the thing to upset the lion
03:18from its North American existence.
03:20So again, what actually happened to the American lion?
03:24Did you ever see the movie Clue?
03:25Maybe it's really that everybody did.
03:28Over-hunting plus climate change plus us out-slothing them?
03:32One plus two plus two plus one?
03:34We're closer to the answer for sure.
03:36The science folks are still working on it.
03:38Stay tuned.