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Zusatztext 56520231 Informationen zum Autor Abigail Tucker’s work has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series. She is the New York Times bestselling author of The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World , named a Best Science Book of 2016 by Library Journal and Forbes , now translated into thirteen languages. A correspondent for Smithsonian magazine, she lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband and four (equally amazing) children. Klappentext An adventure through world history, natural science, and pop culture in search of how cats conquered the world, the Internet, and our hearts. Leseprobe The Lion in the Living Room Chapter 1 CATACOMBS BUBBLING AWAY on Wilshire Boulevard in the middle of downtown Los Angeles, the La Brea Tar Pits look like pools of toxic black taffy. California colonists once harvested tar here to waterproof their roofs, but today these asphalt seeps are far more precious to paleontologists studying Ice Age wildlife. All kinds of fantastic animals mired themselves in the sticky death traps: Columbian mammoths with pretzeled tusks, extinct camels, errant eagles. But most famous of all are the La Brea cats. At least seven types of prehistoric feline inhabited Beverly Hills 11,000 years ago and earlier: close relatives of modern bobcats and mountain lions but also several vanished species. More than 2,000 skeletons of Smilodon populator—the biggest and scariest of the saber-tooth cats—have been recovered from the 23-acre excavation site, making it the largest such trove on the planet. It’s late morning. The asphalt is softening as the day warms and the air smells like melting pavement. Ugly black bubbles popping on the tar pits’ surface make it look as though a monster is breathing just beneath. My eyes water a bit from the fumes and, plunging a stick into the goo, I find that I can’t pull it out. “You only need an inch or two to immobilize a horse,” says John Harris, chief curator of the museum here. “A giant sloth would get stuck like a fly on flypaper.” There’s a touch of pride in his voice. The only way to get the asphalt off your skin is to massage it with mineral oil or butter, as a few local fraternity pranksters have learned the hard way. Given time enough, the tar even seeps into bone, preserving the remains of the giant animals that died in agony here so well that pit specimens aren’t even truly turned-to-stone fossils. Drilling into a preserved saber-tooth rib produces the same smell you get at the dentist’s office: burning collagen. It smells alive. In the murk of the tar pits, I’m searching for clues to the primordial human-feline relationship. Human patronage of cats, which seems so intuitive to us, is in reality a quite recent and radical arrangement. Though we’ve shared the earth for millions of years, the cat family and mankind have never gotten along before, much less gotten cozy on the couch. Our competing needs for meat and space make us natural enemies. Far from sharing food, humans and felines have spent most of our long mutual history snatching each other’s meals and masticating each other’s mangled remains—though to be perfectly honest, mostly they ate us. It was cats like the La Brea saber-tooths, colossal cheetahs, and giant cave lions—and later their modern-day heirs—that dominated the untamed planet. Our prehistoric forebears shared habitats with these sorts of behemoths in parts of the Americas, and in Africa we tangled with various species of saber-tooths for millions of years. So powerful was the ancient feline influence that cats may have helped make us human in the first place. In a storage room, Har...
