Ice Age Animals and Pyramids
Ice Age animals were still roaming the Earth when the pyramids were being built!
During the Ice Age, South America was home to many different varieties of charismatic megafauna. Some of these weird oddities included sabertooth cats, giant ground sloths, and relatives of elephants called gomphotheres. Many of these animals previously were thought to go extinct at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago. However, new molecular dating techniques have found that many of these animals were able to survive much more recently, way after the Ice Age.
For example, the dating methods found that sabertooth cats may have been roaming around South America as recently as 7,000 years ago. Ground sloths seem to have gone extinct even more recently at around 6,000 years ago. Perhaps one of the weirdest Ice Age oddities in South America, Xenorhinotherium, a weird llama-like mammal, went extinct as recently as possibly 3,500 years ago. To put that into perspective, The Great Pyramid of Giza was already 1,000 years old at that time. How incredible to think about!
If you want to learn more about sabertooth cats and other Ice Age oddities, check out our video and recommended collections at Tyrannostorus!