For many animal lovers, one dream vacation stands out above all others.

It’s expensive, it requires a sense of adventure, and an acceptance that you might pay a lot of money to sit very still for a long time and see very little.

Nevertheless, an African safari remains on plenty of bucket lists, and plenty of tourists and animal lovers take the long journey every year in the trip of a lifetime.

But why do we have to travel to Africa to see some of the world’s most awe-inspiring creatures? Why do they wander the African plains but don’t stroll through the US deserts or European forests or Asian mountain ranges?

According to a study published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography back in 2024, a lot of this is down to the relationships of animals with humans.

Of course, humankind originally evolved in Africa too, the same continent on which lions, ostrich, giraffe, elephants, leopards, and rhinoceros continue to roam to this day.

If there is one thing that can be said about humans, as they spread across the globe, it’s that – for all the good we’ve done – we’ve really wreaked havoc on natural ecosystems.

Nowadays it’s climate change, but in earlier times hunting and other activity from our ancestors led to the premature extinction of far too many of the Earth’s species.

So why did creatures like the dodo and the woolly mammoth end up being hunted to extinction by humans when giraffes and lions, for example, did not?

According to the authors of the study, this is in large part because – due to the fact they evolved alongside our species in Africa – these animals learned that we were dangerous and evolved to avoid us, while the dodo (native to Mauritius) and the woolly mammoth (originally from China and Siberia) had no such warning:

“Older, hominin-driven extinctions in the Palaeotropics (before the Late Pleistocene) may have filtered out species with vulnerable trait combinations, rendering Palaeotropical species and their non-Palaeotropical relatives more resistant to later human impacts.”

It’s sad to think that our ancestors were the reason that so many incredible species were rendered extinct from our planet, and many others learned to be scared in our presence. It’s even sadder to know that poaching is still a threat for these incredible creatures.

All the more reason to do everything we can to care for the world around us today.

Thought that was fascinating? Here’s another story you might like: Why You’ll Never See A Great White Shark In An Aquarium