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In Africa, lions can be found in savanna grasslands with
scattered Acacia trees which serve as shade; their habitat
in India is a mixture of dry savanna forest and very dry
deciduous scrub forest. In relatively recent times the
habitat of lions spanned the southern parts of Eurasia,
ranging from Greece to India, |
and most of Africa except the central rainforest-zone and
the Sahara desert. Herodotus reported that lions had been
common in Greece around 480 BC; they attacked the baggage
camels of the Persian king Xerxes on his march through the
country. Aristotle considered them rare by 300 BC and by 100
AD extirpated. A population of the Asiatic lion survived until
the tenth century in the Caucasus, their last European
outpost.
The species was eradicated from
Palestine by the Middle Ages and from most of the rest of Asia
after the arrival of readily available firearms in the
eighteenth century. Between the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century they became extinct in North Africa and the
Middle East. By the late nineteenth century the lion had
disappeared from Turkey and most of northern India, while the
last sighting of a live Asiatic lion in Iran was in 1941
(between Shiraz and Jahrom, Fars province), though the corpse
of a lioness was found on the banks of Karun river, Khuzestan
province in 1944. There are no subsequent reliable reports
from Iran. The subspecies now survives only in and around the
Gir Forest of northwestern India. About 300 lions live in a
1,412 km˛ (558 square miles) sanctuary in the state of
Gujarat, which covers most of the forest. Their numbers are
slowly increasing.
Until the late Pleistocene (about 10,000 years ago), the lion
was the most widespread land mammal aside from man. They were
found in most of Africa, much of Eurasia from western Europe
to India and the Bering land bridge, and in the Americas from
Yukon to Peru. Parts of this range were occupied by subspecies
that are extinct today.
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