Researchers have discovered the naturally mummified and skeletal remains of 61 cheetahs, which were 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 they disappeared from the landscape between 49 and 188 years ago—evidence that bolsters an effort to rewild the region with modern-day cheetahs, according to Ahmed Boug, general director of the National Center for Wildlife in Riyadh. He is lead author of a study detailing the findings that was published on Thursday in Communications Earth & Environment.
Of the 61 cheetahs found, seven were naturally mummified—dried and preserved by the Saudi Arabian desert. Boug and his colleagues carbon 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 about 130 years ago.
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Courtesy of Ahmed Boug
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. He and his colleagues had suspected the remains would show more similarity with Asiatic cheetahs, because members of that subspecies 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, because 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.”