![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Smilodon_fatalis_life-restoration_08.jpg\")
<\/p>\nTrying to figure out what really happened that far back isn’t just complicated. It becomes very controversial in the course of trying to untangle the complications. So while the AI was quite content to spit out the party line about the origin story of the ‘Rockies’ involving the Farallon tectonic plate off the coast of California, the actual geologist I called my informant thought that was … willfully stupid.<\/p>\n
And had other explanations. <\/p>\n
From my POV: whatevs. I’m just glad I find myself living near the high ground. Especially as the temperatures here at the current Basecamp spike up over 100F. <\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
I care much more about recent Prehistory, and especially about the most recent parts from say 25,000 Years Before Present to maybe 10K YBP when everything started to get so civilized. <\/p>\n
Here’s a thing we know for Sure-ish. <\/p>\n
Back then, there were cats the size of lions in New Mexico. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For the most famous saber-toothed cats:
\nHeight: about as tall as a human child
\nBody length: about as long as a small sofa\/couch
\nWeight: on the order of hundreds of pounds (commonly summarized as roughly \u201cup to about 2 adult motorbikes stacked,\u201d i.e., very heavy for a cat-sized predator)
\nFor Smilodon specifically, the canines were famously huge\u2014reports commonly put the adult feline upper canine teeth at around ~7\u20138 inches.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
It’s also pretty clear that there was an overlap of some thousands of years where Kitty and the Humans existed in the same place at the same time. <\/p>\n
The classic formulation for the peopling of the Americas is the Beringia hypotheses: “Well, you see, up north in Siberia and Alaska, there was massive glaciation that prevented the East Asian tribes<\/a> (sometimes called ‘Ancient Paleo-Siberians<\/a>‘) from getting down this way, until lots of melting happened all at once and they rushed in”.<\/p>\n The earliest it could have happened, based on the best verifiable hard Scientific! evidence (stone arrow points found in Idaho) is about 17 thousand years ago.<\/p>\n But what about those tempting clearly human footprints at White Sands, New Mexico, being dated to another five thousand years before that?<\/p>\n