Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 87
A jackal,
Canis aureus
, at Ranthambhore, searching for prey. As the last of the
light faded, the herd of deer that the jackal and its companions were hunting fl ed past me into
the shadows.
the beginning of the Pleistocene, the same period of time during which our
ancestors were learning to hunt them.
It could be that what saved Africa from the devastating overkills of Cali-
fornia, New Zealand, and Madagascar was simply the mind-boggling abun-
dance and diversity of the animals that roamed the African plains and forests.
Human populations were also small throughout much of the Pleistocene, and
people could not live in some parts of the continent because of malaria and
sleeping sickness. But one wonders what damage our ancestors might have
done, despite these constraints, if there had been hunting dogs to help them.
Luckily for Africa's surviving diversity, the wild doglike animals living
there appear not to be easily tamable. The wild dogs of southern and eastern
Africa,
Lycaon pictus
, are separated from the Eurasian wolf by at least three
million years of divergent evolutionary history. These wild dogs are experts
