Most of us got acquainted with saber-toothed tigers on the pages of Alexander Volkov's fairy tale "The Wizard of the Emerald City". In fact, the name "saber-toothed tiger" is far from consistent with the structure and habits of these animals, and is used mainly because of the massive replication by the media.
Modern science believes that these animals lived in prides, hunted together and were generally closer to modern lions, but this does not mean their relationship or even identity. The ancestors of modern felines and the ancestors of saber-toothed cats were divided in the process of evolution millions of years ago.
Photo: voprosy-kak-i-pochemu.ru
It is believed that in Eurasia saber-toothed became extinct 30,000 years ago, and in America the last saber-toothed cat died about 10,000 years ago. However, information comes from Africa indicating that the saber-toothed tiger may have survived in the wilds of this continent.
One of the people talking about such an opportunity is Christian Le Noel, a famous French hunter of large African animals. In the second half of the twentieth century, Noel made a living by organizing African hunts for moneybags. He spent many years in the Central African Republic near Lake Chad. Below is an abridged translation of Le Noel's article on saber-toothed tigers.
Saber-toothed tigers in the center of Africa?
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In the Central African Republic, where I have been a professional hunting leader and organizer for twelve years, local African tribes talk a lot about the saber-toothed predator they call Koq-Nindji, which translates to "mountain tiger".
Interestingly, Koq-Nindji has a privileged position among the legendary animals. The fact is that stories about this animal are common among peoples of various races and tribes, many of which have never met each other. All these peoples call the habitat of the "mountain tiger" the area bounded by the mountainous plateau of Tibesti, the left tributary of the Nile - Bahr el-Ghazal, the plateaus of the Sahara desert and further by the mountains of Uganda and Kenya. Thus, the appearance of this animal was noted over several thousand square kilometers.
Most of the information about the "mountain tiger" I got from the old hunters of the almost extinct tribe Youlous. These people are convinced that Koq-Nindji can still be found in their region. They describe him as a cat larger than a lion. The skin has a reddish tint, covered with stripes and spots. The feet of his paws are overgrown with thick hair, this leads to the fact that the animal practically leaves no traces. But most of all the hunters were struck and frightened by the huge fangs protruding from the mouth of the predator.
The description of the animal practically corresponds to the idea of scientists about the appearance of saber-toothed, whose fossil remains were discovered and dated from 30 to 10 thousand years ago. Thus, the ancient saber-toothed tigers lived at the time when the first modern humans appeared.
The hunters of African tribes are practically illiterate people and have never seen a single textbook. I decided to take advantage of this and showed them some photographs of felines that exist today. In the middle of the stack of photographs, I placed a picture of a saber-toothed tiger. All hunters did not hesitate to choose him as a "mountain tiger".
As proof, I was even shown a cave into which the animal dragged the prey taken from the hunters. Then the tiger effortlessly carried away the carcass of a three hundred kilogram antelope. According to the hunters, it was thirty years before our conversation in 1970.
The peoples living in the north of the Central African Republic also have widespread stories about the “water lion”. I assume they are the same animal. Or these animals are close relatives.
There is a written testimony from a European about a "water lion". In 1910, a French column led by an officer and non-commissioned officers was sent to suppress the revolt of local residents. For the crossing of the Bamingui River, pies carrying ten people were used. In the military archives, there is an officer's report about how a lion attacked the pirogue and carried one of the shooters into the mouth.
The wife of one of the hunters told me that in the fifties, the "water lion" was caught in the fishing pits. Such fish traps can reach a diameter of more than a meter in these places. So, the woman said that the animal was killed, and the skull went to the village headman. Despite the large sum of money that I offered to the headman, he refused to show me the skull and said that the woman was mistaken. Apparently, this reaction is due to the local custom of not sharing secrets with whites. “These are our last secrets. Whites know everything about everything and they took everything from us. If they find out our last secrets, we will have nothing left,”local residents say.
According to local residents, “water lions” live in caves located on the rocky banks of local rivers. Predators are predominantly nocturnal. “Their eyes sparkle in the night like carbuncles, and their roar is like the roar of the wind before a storm,” say the locals.
My friend Marcel Halley, who was hunting in Gabon in the 1920s, witnessed a strange fact. Once, while hunting in a swamp, he was attracted by strange wheezing from the thicket. He found a wounded female hippopotamus. There were several deep and long wounds on the animal's body that could not have been inflicted by another hippo, especially since these animals never attack females. Only males fight among themselves. Among other wounds, the animal had two huge and deep ones: one on the neck and the other on the shoulder.
A similar incident happened to me in 1970. I was asked to destroy the hippopotamus, which became aggressive, he attacked the pies on which people swam from Chad to Cameroon. After killing the animal, I found wounds on its body that matched the description of Marcel Halley.
The wounds on the neck and shoulder were rounded and so deep that the hand sank into them up to the elbow. The wounds had not yet been infected, indicating a recent origin. These wounds may well have been inflicted by a predator resembling a saber-toothed tiger, and could not have been inflicted by any known predator in existence.
In these places, representatives of the flora extinct throughout the rest of the Earth have survived, such as, for example, cycads from the genus Encephalyartos. Why not assume that fossil animals also survived?