During the construction of the First American National Bank building in downtown Nashville in 1971, a small cave containing a collection of bones was unearthed. These included the remains of a Woodland Period human burial, rodents, deer, amphibians, horses, and the partial skeleton of the sabertoothed “tiger,” from the genus Smilodon. Radiocarbon dating of this specimen places it at the end of the Pleistocene, 9410+/-155 B.P. and 10,035+/-650 B.P. This would make it one of the most recent occurrences of Smilodon in the fossil record. The Southeastern Indian Antiquities Survey and…
