The cave lion is an extinct relative of the African lion, which lived until around fourteen-thousand years ago. If we could better understand the reasons that this animal went extinct (for example was it due to the climate warming, being hunted by humans, or their habitat disappearing?), we could use this information to help protect its current-day relatives. These relatives are some of the most endangered species on the planet, such as Amur leopards, Iberian lynxes, and Asiatic cheetahs.
On the other hand, wolves lived at a similar time to cave lions, but are still around today and so on the face of it, did not go extinct. However, when we look at the genetics of very old fossils from wolves, we see that there were varieties around in the past that are not here today, so like the cave lion, some wolves did go extinct. What are the differences between these evolutionary "success" and "failure" examples? It may be that they naturally had genetic traits that better enabled them to adapt to the quickly warming climate at the time, or perhaps they inherited those traits by breeding with closely related species that we know existed at the time? If we knew that this breeding between closely related species was needed to stop them from going extinct, it might make us change the way that we manage similar species today.
This research project aimed to get a better understanding why cave lions went extinct and wolves did not. Specifically, we used DNA from the bones of these animals (up to 40,000 years old) to attempt to answer the questions: 1) When did these populations or species go extinct? 2) How are the extinct populations related to the living ones? 3) Are there any genetic traits that are associated with these species either going extinct or surviving? 4) Can this tell us anything about how animals are likely to respond to the changing climate in the future?
