have read elsewhere that cheetahs are probably an evolutionary dead end, slouching toward the edge of extinction for thousands of years. Didn’t they have a really rough spot about 6000 years ago?
Yeah, their genetics record a bottleneck somewhere around 6-10,000 years ago - when most of the species died off and they had to repopulate from only a few individuals.
However, a large number of vertebrates also died off or nearly died out at about the same time. Other vertebrates had their numbers severely reduced... including *us*. The cheetahs were lucky enough to not die out completely, but not lucky enough to still have had large numbers of mating individuals survive whatever it was that hit the place.