Response to Comment by Faurby, Werdelin and Svenning

Faurby, Werdelin, and Svenning raise some interesting and valid points around the interpretation of the genomics and fossil data on the history of the African cheetah, a species that has fascinated humankind for millennia. They emphasize a controversy to which we alluded in our article [1] and they offer an alternative explanation to the scenario we had suggested for the time and place of demographic events that preceded modern African cheetah populations. We fully agree that there are important areas of uncertainty in this conundrum and welcome the opportunity to reconsider and to offer our view into the natural history of Acinonyx jubatus. We do believe that the integration of fossil and molecular data seems a good way to get toward the truth, so we shall try to emphasize two considerations in our comments: first, the most parsimonious interpretation of data; and second, the robustness of available and relevant fossil and molecular data.