Researchers have discovered the mummified and skeletal remains of 61 cheetahs, hidden deep inside caves in northern Saudi Arabia for hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years.
The find indicates that these big cats roamed the Arabian Peninsula for millennia before disappearing from the landscape about 100 years ago—evidence that bolsters an effort to rewild the region with modern-day cheetahs, according to Ahmed Boug, the general director of the National Center for Wildlife in Riyadh. He is the lead author on a study detailing the findings published on Thursday in Communication Earth & Environment.
Of the 61 cheetahs found, seven were naturally mummified—dried and preserved by the Saudi Arabian desert. Boug and his colleagues dated two of these specimens and five of the skeletal remains, with the oldest having lived some 4,000 years ago, and the youngest having lived 130 years ago.
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They also sequenced the genomes of three of the seven sampled specimens. The older cheetah remains were more genetically similar to a Northwest African subspecies, whereas the more recent cheetah remains were more similar to the Asiatic cheetah, which is now mostly confined to a very small population in Iran.
“It was a big surprise,” Boug says, as he and his colleagues had suspected the remains to show more similarity with Asiatic cheetahs, as these have been sighted in Saudi Arabia in the past century and their habitat today is geographically closer than Northwest Africa.
But the findings suggest that wasn’t always the case. “There appears to have been a change in what subpopulation was present or dominant in the region over time, not stable coexistence as far as we can see,” he says. “The geographic story is something we are continuing to tease out.”
The study doesn’t answer why cheetahs disappeared from Saudi Arabia. Climate change was not likely a factor, Boug says, as the landscape has been harsh and arid for thousands of years. Instead, he attributes the big cats’ dwindling presence to human pressures, both from poaching and the encroachment of industry and residential areas on formerly wild areas. In turn, Boug hopes the research can help inform rewilding efforts in the kingdom, including the possible reintroduction of the big cats to the landscape.
“The key insight from our discovery is that more than one subspecies of cheetah inhabited Saudi Arabia,” Boug says. “That opens the field considerably to how cheetahs are sourced and the implications of introducing diversity into the gene pool.”
