Answer:
The answer is the bottleneck effect.
Explanation:
The African cheetah is one of the textbook examples of a genetic bottleneck. Although cheetahs have been on the earth for millions of years, they are expected to become extinct in the coming decades because all the individuals alive today are highly similar in genetic terms. This proves that at some point in the recent past, the cheetah population was reduced to just a handful of individuals. It is believed this happened at the end of the last ice age occurring about 10,000 years ago. This is when many large animals became extinct due to drastic climate changes. Scientists currently estimate there are only about 10,000 cheetahs in the wild with very little genetic variation between them.
