Did humans live with saber-toothed cats?

Yes, humans lived during the same time period as saber-toothed cats. Now extinct, saber-toothed cats existed from the Eocene through the Pleistocene Epoch (56 million to 11,700 years ago). The most widely known is the genus Smilodon, a cat about the size of a modern African lion and more commonly referred to as a “saber-toothed tiger.” Smilodon inhabited North and South America during the Pleistocene. The species Homo sapiens, to which all modern humans belong, evolved in the later part of the middle Pleistocene, and early forms of the species are known from about 400,000 years ago. Fossil evidence indicates that humans migrated to South America and the area that is now the southwestern United States between 30,000 and 21,000 years ago, providing for an overlap of time and geography between humans and saber-toothed cats.