She-Wolf - Range and Conservation - Africa

Africa

Up until 2011, it was debated whether or not the gray wolf occurred in Africa. Aristotle wrote of wolves living in Egypt, mentioning that they were smaller than the Greek kind. Georg Ebers wrote of the wolf being among the sacred animals of Egypt, describing it as a "smaller variety" of wolf to those of Europe, and noting how the name Lykopolis, the Ancient Egyptian city dedicated to Anubis, means "city of the wolf". Zoologist Ernst Schwarz classified North Africa's wolf-like canid as a subspecies of golden jackal, and was subsequently criticised for having overlooked its morphological affinity to the gray wolf. In December 2002, a canid was sighted in Eritrea's Danakil Desert, whose appearance didn't correspond to that of the golden jackal or the six other recognised species of the area, but strongly resembled that of the gray wolf. That the canid was a gray wolf was proven in 2011, when the base pairs of the mtDNA of samples taken from the Ethiopian Highlands were analyzed and compared with those of other wolves and wolf-like canids. The results suggested that African wolves inhabit at least two places in Ethiopia, approximately 2,500 km southeast of Egypt. A further study confirmed the presence of wolves in Algeria, Mali and Senegal.