Phantom Big Cats

I've just finished reading The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. On a long digression into human evolution he suggests that rather than evolving as a hunter, man evolved from Australopithecus in response to predation by prehistoric big cats such as Dinofelis, on the open grassland of Africa.

This fits in nicely with an article in Fortean Times a couple of months ago, which suggested a reason why there are so many reports of non-native big cats in the UK, but so little physical evidence (the occasional dead lynx is found by the roadside, but people report seeing cougars, panthers and even lions). If there was a phase in human evolution when the big cats were our major predator, it would make sense that we have a mental template of what a big cat looks like and an inbuilt instinct that draws our attention to any potential big cats in our surroundings. And if there are occasional false positives, so that we 'see' a big cat where there is really a small domestic cat, a large dog or just a collection of shadows making a vaguely catlike shape, then that is safer than missing a big cat lurking in the shadows.