Widely distributed in sub-Saharan Africa, occurring in scattered populations in West Africa eastwards to Ethiopia and then southwards in protected areas and unsettled, or very lightly settled, areas in East and southern Africa. Historically, P. africanus did not occur in the arid Karoo of South Africa where it was replaced by the extinct Cape Warthog P. aethiopicus aethiopicus (Cumming in press). The continuous expansion of the Sahel-zone has resulted in a marked contraction in the species’ former range in the north since the early 1980s, and accounts for its probable extinction in Niger (J. Newby, in Vercammen and Mason 1993).