MovieChat Forums > Alpha (2018) Discussion > The hyenas

The hyenas

posted 4 years ago by Kj1oceanlust (1456)
2 replies | jump to latest

It was a superb movie from my estimation, quite original. The beginning was kind of laugh worthy as someone else pointed out in another thread. I'm referring specifically to the buffalo hunt and how it went down. Something else that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, was the hyena pack. I know it was set 20,000 years before now, but in ecological terms, that's not to distant from now. I know there were different animals before us, but it just doesn't correlate well with today, as they lived in a cold snowy environment. Alas, hyena's today prefer a warm dry environment in Africa. Okay to get right to the point, that just didn't make sense to me to have hyenas in this movie. Or am I wrong? Were there hyena's living in environments like that back then?

[–] HarlemEagle42 (17735) 4 years ago

According to fossil evidence, hyenas were once common in Europe for as long as one million years(!).

[–] gkun (15) 4 years ago

As written by another poster, yes, hyenas did live in Europe, and two species of them (one, the cave hyena, is extinct today, the other one the two species extant now). Also the striped hyena lives in the Caucasus mountain range very very close to Europe even now. They did live through the glacial age, but got extinct in prehistoric times (I think they are represented in ancient cave art from Europe though). Also, Lions did live in Europe until historic times (I believe they got extinct during the bronze age, but I might be wrong). Another, bigger species of Lion (cave Lion) also inhabited Europe.

Some scientists hypothesize that mega fauna and their predators in Europe got extinct because of hunting from humans, but I think that is contested and won't ever be clear.