IUCN / SSC Cat Specialist Group - Digital Cat Library |
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| Packer, C. | |
| Is India's pride actually African? | |
| 2013 Science (340): 128-129 | |
The Assyrians drew modern lions, _Panthera leo_, from first hand experience in ancient Mesopotamia; lions were familiar to the Egyptian pharaohs; the Old Testament describes lions near Jerusalem; Alexander the Great killed a lion in Greece. But lion portraits also appeared in countries where they never lived. Maned lions adorn the medieval crests of England and northern Europe and the art of dynastic China. Just because a nation's cultural tradition celebrated the lion doesn't mean it was a native species. Which brings us to the current distribution of Panthera leo, now restricted to the continent of Africa-with the curious exception of the lions of Gir Forest in the Indian state of Gujarat. For nearly two centuries, biologists have labeled Gir lions as "Asiatic lions" and designated them as a subspecies, _P. l. persica._ Genetic tests from the 1980s seemed to confirm this classification, because they found exceptionally low variation in blood enzymes-as expected from a long history of inbreeding in a small population. But the Gir lions show no obvious morphological distinctions from African lions. Whereas recent DNA tests reveal clear differences between the Gir lions and lions from eastern and southern Africa, they cannot be distinguished from North African lions. |
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