A Population Built on a Handful of Survivors
At the turn of the twentieth century, the Asiatic lion was functionally gone from the Indian subcontinent. The last viable group, fewer than twenty individuals by some estimates, clung to the teak forests of the Gir region in what is now Gujarat, protected by the Nawab of Junagadh. Every one of the 674 lions counted in the 2020 census descends from that remnant. The genetic material available to the entire species today was shaped by whichever lions happened to survive that bottleneck, not by any process of selection for fitness or resilience.
