Sabercat extinction has been understood in terms of top-down ecological stress, a victim of ‘trophic cascade’, just as the top predators of the ocean today are dying off because populations of prey fishes are collapsing beneath them. The plight of today’s big cats also seems to echo the downfall of Smilodon: we know that leopards, tigers, jaguars and other big cats require large swathes of habitat that are connected through ecological corridors, providing them with plenty of ground to stalk, and enough prey to survive. Decrease the habitat and food supply, and the cats suffer. But what if we could trace the clues back the other way? What if the extinction of Smilodon could help us understand what wiped out so many of the species it relied upon for food? New research on this question could help us untangle the frighteningly mysterious nature of extinction — in the past and future — itself. For now, the exact reason why Smilodon disappeared remains unknown. Loss of food is a likely cause, but that answer only moves the question a step back to why Smilodon’s prey died out. The sabercat was a casualty in a wider extinction at the end of the Pleistocene that marked the end of the Ice Age and the beginning of a world over which our species has disproportionate influence. Some researchers like to call this the Anthropocene, but whether or not such a designation truly fits depends on how long our species lasts. What might the fossil record look like 100m years from now? The Pleistocene extinction could come to shade into the modern biodiversity crisis with little or no break in between. The close of the Ice Age might have been the beginning of a new age, or it could have been one dramatic blip in an ongoing mass extinction, tracking the rise of human dominance. Some of the garbage that ends up preserved in La Brea’s asphalt might help future archaeologists untangle this mystery.

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