Fossils have been found from the Holocene epoch showing that two divergent lines of warthogs (Phacochoerus spp.) were in existence thousands of years ago. The ancestors of the present day common warthog (P. africanus) had a different number of incisors than the ancestral desert warthog (P. aethiopicus) line. During the late nineteenth century, P. aethiopicus became extinct in South Africa. Subsequently, study of mDNA as well as morphological analysis has shown that the East African population of warthogs, previously thought to be a variant of the common warthog, are in fact surviving members of the putatively extinct P. aethiopicus.
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