6 Extinct Animals That Once Lived Alongside Ancient Civilizations

The aurochs, or Bos primigenius, is an ancestor of modern cattle that once lived in North Africa and Eurasia. Researchers have found rock art in Egypt depicting aurochs that dates back beyond the ancient period into the prehistoric Pleistocene.

The last known aurochs supposedly died in 1627 in modern-day Poland. However, a paper published in 2021 asserts that an aurochs fossil unearthed in Bulgaria dates to the late 17th century or early 18th century, placing the animal’s extinction somewhere around that time.

Surprisingly, there are some aurochs enthusiasts who believe they can breed the species back into existence. So far, the aurochs remains extinct.

Madagascar was once home to flightless elephant birds that weighed more than 750 pounds and stood up to 10 feet tall. Thanks to research published in 2018, we know that humans started interacting with these birds as early as 10,500 years ago. That’s because researchers found human-modified bones of elephant birds dating to that period.

Elephant birds existed until at least A.D. 1000, which we know because researchers have dated their eggshells to this period. Scientists have identified multiple species of elephant bird in the genera Aepyornis, Mullerornis and Vorombe, but the jury’s still out on what led these birds to go extinct.

Chendytes lawi was a flightless bird that lived in what is now California and died out around 500 B.C. Its extinction date makes it fairly unique among extinct North American animals, most of which either died out during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene or went extinct after European colonization.

We have evidence that humans began eating California’s flightless duck around 11,000 years ago, says Terry L. Jones, a professor emeritus of anthropology at California Polytechnic State University and co-author of a paper about Chendytes lawi. However, this hunting did not lead to the bird’s immediate extinction. Instead, these ducks continued to live alongside the humans who hunted them for roughly 8,000 years.

So what made California’s flightless duck go extinct? Jones says it was likely a combination of human hunting and climate change. His theory is that because the hunting had already made the birds vulnerable (he suspects that in addition to eating the birds, humans were also eating their eggs), Chendytes lawi was not able to survive a warm water event that happened around 2,300 to 2,500 years ago.

“The duck had withstood untold bouts of climate change in the millions of years that it was around before humans arrived, so it really was a combination of those things,” he says. “It was human predation but then with a little push from climate.”

Another now-extinct animal that survived initial human contact was the Sardinian pika, or Prolagus sardus. However, estimates on when this small mammal eventually went extinct vary widely, says Blanca Moncunill-Solé, a paleobiologist in Spain and co-author of a paper about the pika.

The earliest estimates place this animal’s extinction around 800 B.C. on the Italian island of Sardinia, she says. Other scholars have speculated that the pika survived until 400 B.C. or even into the medieval period on the French island of Corsica, but the evidence remains uncertain.

Before Prolagus sardus went extinct, it lived alongside humans on Sardinia for thousands of years. While there is some evidence that humans may have hunted these animals, Moncunill-Solé says humans also introduced other predators to the island that could have hunted the pika, as well as animals that could have competed with the pika for food. Additionally, human activity likely introduced new pathogens to the island and reshaped the environment in which the pikas lived in.

Moncunill-Solé tells HISTORY that although scientists don’t know exactly why the Sardinian pika went extinct, it was likely due to a combination of factors, rather than a single cause.

In 2018, researchers announced they’d discovered a new extinct species of ape inside a Chinese tomb in the ancient city of Xi’an.

The tomb likely belonged to Lady Xia, the grandmother of Emperor Qin Shi Huang. Qin ruled as China’s first emperor from 221 to 210 B.C. and was buried with his famous Terracotta Army. His grandmother, it seems, was buried with an imperial gibbon. Originally called Junzi imperialis, but now known as Nomascus imperialis, this gibbon might have been a high-status pet.

Samuel T. Turvey, a professor at the Zoological Society of London’s Institute of Zoology and co-author of the 2018 paper, writes in an email to HISTORY that deforestation could have been a factor in the imperial gibbon’s extinction.

“The imperial gibbon probably survived until the 18th century, a period of Chinese history that saw extensive migration of rural communities and a new wave of forest loss as these migrant communities cleared habitat for farmland,” he writes.

The animal to go extinct most recently on this list is the passenger pigeon, or Ectopistes migratorius. Its story helps illustrate how European colonization disrupted ecosystems in the Americas.

The passenger pigeon was once endemic to North America, with an estimated population of 3 to 5 billion. For thousands of years, the bird coexisted with Native people, many of whom hunted it as a source of food. After European colonists established settlements that later became the United States, U.S. citizens hunted this bird more aggressively in the 19th century. This aggressive hunting, coupled with deforestation, helped drive it to extinction.

The last known passenger pigeon died on September 1, 1914, at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her name was Martha. The zoo workers who discovered her dead body quickly froze it and sent it to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to be taxidermied. It remains in the Smithsonian's collections to this day.