WI: Lions still have their full historic range?

Hmmm, perhaps hunting is curbed, and the lion is pushed as a national symbol...perhaps as the animal embodiment of an emperor's rule on even the animals of his kingdom....I definitely want to touch on this in my TL....anybody knowledgeable on Indian lion populations in the 1500s?
 
The real challenge is to unite all these lions under the Kingdom of León.

Ukraine didn't have any lions. And the Indo-Europeans may have appeared east of the Volga Delta.

Wrong, there are quite late holocene subfossils of lions from ukraine region


Edvardas can you show me anything scientificaly relevant about tigers in europe?
 
anybody knowledgeable on Indian lion populations in the 1500s?

I'm not knowledgeable, but there were certainly lions across northern India into the period of British rule. Iirc, it was only from the 1870s onward that tiger hunting became popular, once all the lions had been wiped out.

It makes you wonder how an area like, say, Iran would have looked in terms of fauna in the time of Alexander the Great. Lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, bears, and wolves. How did all of this species interact with one another? I for one would be fascinated to know- you would think that lions and tigers would certainly be incompatible with one another.
 
I for one would be fascinated to know- you would think that lions and tigers would certainly be incompatible with one another.
Well, you have other big cats beyond lions in Africa, that still works. (Though the lions will attempt to kill rival predators/their young.) In that regard, the tiger has an advantage over something like the cheetah. Like the cheetah, it should of course stay away from lion prides, but it stands a much better chance against a patrolling lone male lion. Such an encounter is not really that different from meeting another tiger.

You're right though about the environment then being quite interesting. That's basically all the major predator types, all in one place. (Though they could be living in different types of terrain.)
 
There were tigers in the caucasus until about the time the nazis invaded, the north side of which was in europe.
 
There were tigers in the caucasus until about the time the nazis invaded, the north side of which was in europe.

Referring to this?

Panthera_tigris_virgata.jpg


EDIT: Fun fact, according to Wikipedia, this guy (the Caspian tiger) ranks as one of the largest cats that has ever existed, a title that it disputes with the Siberian and Bengal tigers.
 
Yep, if Iran wanted to reintroduce tigers into their national parks they could just get some siberians and let them go and it would be perfectly authentic.
 
you know whats funny fact? Caspian tigers were just western subpopulation of Siberian tigers

But it was distinct enough to be given its own subspecies. The "migration" of Siberians to the Caspian where it developed a population occurred 10,000 years ago according to that article. I think that's more than enough time to give the Caspian tiger its own identifier.
 
I'm not knowledgeable, but there were certainly lions across northern India into the period of British rule. Iirc, it was only from the 1870s onward that tiger hunting became popular, once all the lions had been wiped out.

It makes you wonder how an area like, say, Iran would have looked in terms of fauna in the time of Alexander the Great. Lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, bears, and wolves. How did all of this species interact with one another? I for one would be fascinated to know- you would think that lions and tigers would certainly be incompatible with one another.
To grossly oversimplify, tigers are woodlands cats, lions are on the plains.
 
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