History

The cheetah originated about 4,000,000 years ago, long before the other big cats. The oldest fossils place it in North America in what is now Texas, Nevada and Wyoming. Cheetahs were common throughout Asia, Africa, Europe and North America until the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, when massive climatic changes caused large numbers of mammals to disappear. About that time all cheetah in North America and Europe and most of those in Asia and Africa vanished. Some experts think our present populations were derived from inbreeding by those very few surviving and closely related animals. This inbreeding "bottleneck", as theorized, led to the present state of cheetah genetics: all cheetah alive today appear to be as closely related as identical twins.

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