14 DAY TRIAL // When thinking of Africa, and of the wild, hyenas and lions are among the first images to spring to mind. But what few people wonder is why hyenas only exist in Africa, and not in Europe or the Americas.
Now, a team of investigators announces the results of a research study that was conducted on this issue. The group wanted to know what happened to hyenas that used to live in Europe.
Undoubtedly, after the animals appeared, they spread to many regions around the world. Considering that the species is very old, the continents were most likely arranged differently when the animal appeared.
Therefore, it stands to reason that it spread all over the place, just like any other species. But somehow it only managed to survive in Africa, and not in Europe.
The research group, made up of experts at the National Museum of Natural Sciences (CSIC), sought to determine the factors that lead to spotted hyenas being wiped out of the European continent.
Scientists looked first at how the climate patterns of the time may have influenced the survival chances of the creatures some 10,000 years ago.
One of the main conclusions in the study was that temperatures did play a role, but not the most important one. Human expansion had a lot more to do with the animals being wiped off.
An additional factors that was also found to play a critical role was the sum of changes that appeared in the in herbivorous fauna which the hyena preferred to hunt.
“Climate change in the past was not directly responsible for the extinction of the spotted hyena in southern Europe, but it was a factor in its disappearance,” expert Sara Varela tells SINC.
She is a CSIC researcher, and also the lead author of the new investigation. Details of the work were published in the latest issue of the Journal Quaternary Science Reviews, AlphaGalileo reports.
“The climatic conditions in southern Europe 21,000 years ago were extreme for this species” Varela adds, saying that a glacial maximum was responsible for separating the Eurasian hyenas from their African counterparts.
“The survival of the hyenas could have been affected by the combination of these three factors acting in synergy, but not by the action of the climate alone,” the team leader goes on to say.
“The climatic conditions in the south of Europe were at all times within the tolerance range of this species,” she concludes.