Ituri Rainforest

A Mbuti hunter who described the same animal was telling folktales.

In 1899, the British journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley, a man whose reputation in Central Africa was already substantial and deeply complicated, mentioned in one of his accounts that Mbuti communities had described to him a kind of donkey that lived in the Ituri forest.

Stanley did not pursue the report.

He noted it and moved on, presumably filing it in the same mental category as all the other unusual things that Central African communities had told him during his years of travelling through the region.

You found them in the Kalahari Desert.

You found them in the Ituri rainforest in Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Basically, when agriculture moves into an area people that are already there either become agriculturalists or end up getting pushed out.

And it is, to some degree, a numbers game.