Tigers are believed to have evolved over 1 million years ago in what is now South China. From there the tiger eventually spread north to the Amur region of far eastern Russia, south to the islands of Indonesia, and southwest to Indochina and the Indian subcontinent, eastern Turkey, and the Caspian Sea.

     This century has already seen major losses of wild tigers. By the 1950s, the Caspian tiger was extinct, populations of tigers that once inhabited the islands of Bali and Java are now extinct. The last Bali tiger was killed in 1937; the last Javan tiger sighting occured in 1972. Modern India has the largest number of tigers, with between 1000 and 1,500. The South China tiger, with at best 20 to 30 individuals, is nearly extinct in the wild. It is estimated that only 3,500 individual tigers now remain in the entire world. These remaining tigers are threatened by many factors, including growing human populations, loss of habitat, illegal hunting of the tiger and their prey species and the expanding trade in tiger parts for traditional medicines.