Lion When I Die Don’t Let Me Vote Democrat Shirt

As an apex predator, lions have important ecological impacts and have featured prominently in human iconography . During the Pleistocene, lions ranged over an enormous geographic expanse. This included modern lions (Panthera leo leo) in Eurasia, the cave lion (Panthera leo spelaea) in Eurasia, Alaska, and Yukon, as well as the American lion (Panthera leo atrox) in North America. At present, their range is mostly restricted to Sub-Saharan Africa, along with one small, isolated population of Asiatic lions in the Kathiawar Peninsula of Gujarat State in India. The global decline of lion populations started with the extinction of the cave and American lions in the Late Pleistocene, ca. 14,000 y ago . More recently, modern lion populations have disappeared from southwestern Eurasia (19th and 20th century) and North Africa (20th century), likely as a result of anthropogenic factors (3, 4). In the last 150 y, this decline has resulted in the extinction in the wild of the Barbary lion in North Africa, the Cape lion in South Africa, lion populations in the Middle East, and has led to increased fragmentation and decline of all of the remaining populations.Although the global genetic structure of lions, including the relationship between the extant and extinct lineages, has been explored in previous studies, these inferences were based on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data (5⇓⇓–8), or a limited number of mitochondrial and autosomal marker. Here, we expand on these prior findings with whole-genome resequencing data from a set of modern, historic, and Pleistocene lions, including representatives from both their current and former distributions.

Lion When I Die Don’t Let Me Vote Democrat Shirt

Particularly, we aimed to answer: 1) What phylogenetic relationships are found among modern and cave lions? 2) Is there any modern lion population genetically closer to the extinct cave lion? 3) When did the different modern lion lineages start to diverge? And 4) how does their past genetic diversity compare to that found today?We generated whole-genome sequences from 20 ancient and modern individuals. These included 2 cave lion specimens from Siberia and Yukon that have both been radiocarbon dated to ca. 30,000 14C years before present, which were sequenced to an average depth of coverage of 5.3-fold and 0.6-fold, respectively (SI Appendix, Table S1). Our modern lions are represented by 12 historical Panthera leo samples that were collected between the 15th century and 1959, whose genome coverages range from 0.16-fold to 16.2-fold (SI Appendix, Table S1). The geographic distribution of these samples broadly covers the historical range of modern lions, including regions where they are currently extinct (North Africa, the Cape Province of South Africa, and Western Asia) (Fig. 1A). We completed our dataset with 6 wild-born present-day samples from Eastern and Southern Africa and India , as well as 2 previously published whole-genome sequences of Sub-Saharan African lions collected from a zoo .