I would think that 5K is a long time for any event to occur, however unlikely. The fact that there was no confirmed spotting doesn't mean all that much to me, especially if you look back all the way into ancient history where certainly not every animal sighting was recorded.
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from the OP:
The lone individual was caught and killed by people around 30 km from the border with Sudan, a paper in Mammalia reports.
My first reaction was disbelief until I checked the photos and videos of the remains," said the study's lead author, Dr. Abdullah Nagy from Al-Azhar University, Egypt. "Seeing the evidence, I was completely taken aback. It was beyond anything we had expected to find in Egypt."
This was not some improbable random event that took 5000 years to be observed. Climate change recently created a new corridor of acceptable conditions that allowed a hyena from a distant region to migrate.
Bigger predators and sheep/goats/etc don't mix well in general (should not be a surprise).
Protecting the rights of bigger predators over those of shepherds/farmers is something that rich nations can afford, but it still meets a lot of popular opposition (=> see wolves/brown bears in central Europe). An economically weaker nation like Egypt can not justify a move like that, especially if the animal in question is useless for tourism, too.
Don't worry too much tough, spotted Hyenas are not threatened.
Everybody loves the idea of reintroducing wildlife. Nobody likes the idea of releasing a grizzly bear within 500 miles of their house.
The Sahara's sand is actually full of a lot of nutrients. In fact the massive Saharan sandstorms that traverse the Atlantic Ocean are a significant source of fertilizer for the Amazon rainforest
All the elements are there. You just need the right weather and plant life to get things going.
Of course we can't ignore the human element. Archeological evidence suggests humans played a massive role in transitioning the Amazon Rainforest from the grassland it once was to the jungle it now is. Reforestation projects, Great Green Wall, half-moon berm projects, etc are all way way more effective than they were just a few years ago. We're learning a lot about how much humans can do to revitalize soils
One of these is a cyclical pattern of tens of thousands of years that caused warming and cooling somewhat less that a degree. For about six thousand years earth was half a degree warmer and weather patterns in the Sahara were different. Then there was some cooling until modern CO2 issues.
In the early twentieth century there were some very real concerns about long term climate cooling as climate science was being developed but instead greenhouse gases have blasted us very far and very fast in the other direction.
There’s a 10,000 year period from the exit of the last ice age to about the year 0 where global temperatures were at least as warm as the 1960-1990 average. For a maybe 6000 year period within that global temperatures were about a half a degree or a little less warmer than that 1960-1990 average.
You’re just wrong. Before greenhouse gas emissions took control there’s a well recognized pattern of slow global cooling over a few thousand years.
Look at the graph https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/what’s-hott...
The origin of the name is actually that Eric the Red called it that to attract settlers there. Just marketing, really.
> The individual described in this study killed two goats herded by people in Wadi Yahmib in the Elba Protected Area, and was subsequently tracked, spotted, chased and killed in late February 2024.
My first reaction was the same - then I read this and I don’t hold it against the people anymore.
Article title: "Spotted hyena found in Egypt for the FIRST TIME in 5,000 years"
Their current territory is very restricted in comparison with the past.
Could it be genetic engineering. Some prankster billionaires scientist wanting to repopulate the world?
Or are we just getting better at finding them with more tools. (better camera traps, drones, data mining tools with AI?)
I'm curious, does anyone know? Is my billionaire prankster concept plausible? or totally implausible?
The point being that this isn't about an animal we haven't seen recently, and so the speculations of the person I responded to about genetic engineering and the like are unwarranted.
Totally implausible.
You underestimate how large the Earth is, and how little of it is intensely observed.
IIRC when you learn theory for your driver's license in Sweden, the book says "at dusk you pass an animal on the edge of the road roughly every minute". How many of those do you actually see?
“The four extant species are the striped hyena (Hyaena hyaena), the brown hyena (Parahyaena brunnea), the spotted hyena (Crocuta crocuta), and the aardwolf (Proteles cristata)”
Why did the hitman kill this person?
If you stop your questioning at "Because he was paid, duh" you're a really crappy detective.
A good detective would then ask "Okay but why was he paid to kill this person?"