 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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