a mixture of dry savanna forest and very dry deciduous scrub forest. [ 142 ] The habitat of lions originally spanned the southern parts of Eurasia , ranging from Greece to India , and most of Africa except the central rainforest -zone and the Sahara desert. Herodotus reported that lions had been common in Greece in 480 BC; they attacked the baggage camels of the Persian king Xerxes on his march through the country. Aristotle considered them rare by 300 BC. By 100 AD they were extirpated. [ 143 ] A population of Asiatic lions survived until the tenth century in the Caucasus , their last European outpost. [ 144 ] The species was eradicated from Palestine by the Middle Ages and from most of the rest of Asia after the arrival of readily available firearms in the eighteenth century. Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, they became extinct in North Africa and Southwest Asia . By the late nineteenth century, the lion had disappeared from Turkey and most of northern India, [ 16 ] [ 145 ] while the last sighting of a live Asiatic lion in Iran was in 1941 (between Shiraz and Jahrom, Fars Province ), although the corpse of a lioness was found on the banks of the Karun river, Khūzestān Province in 1944. There are no subsequent reliable reports from Iran . [ 81 ] The subspecies now survives only in and around the Gir Forest of northwestern India. [ 23 ] Approximately