Coming on the heels of PBS’s science program, NOVA, a few nights ago in which the theory of the pleistocene extinction is considered in light of the recently revealed evidence of impact by cosmic bollide approximately 13 thousand years ago, news like this is doubly intriguing.

My contention is that lions, like any predator exists in relationship to the size and abundance of its prey. Grazing animals evolutionary strategy can take several pathways but if there is food enough, increased size will confer an advantage and so we see really big animals in the context of big areas of open and mixed grasslands. Our current planetary ecology, while it seems like the status quo, is in fact a gap from what would be the normally expected climate of ice ages which in fact have dominated our terrestrial ecology for most of the last couple of million years. These ice ages, while commonly thought of a impinging on habitat overall, also created what had to be one of the largest contiguous mosaic of non-forested habitats possible; a zone of grassland, steppe, tundra and cold desert, ideal for adapted grazers and browsers that would have reached from Europe, across Asia and Beringia (now submerged) all the way to the Eastern US.

The current context in which we think of lions and other creatures including our own ancestors is formed mainly by how historians have interpreted what was conservatively known with a reasonable degree objective certainty. Well, a lot has been discovered since we were all in school reading history on wax tablets and much of that has not yet been incorporated into the general understanding, but thanks to info such as this, we’re beginning to awaken to it.