this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
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First of all, okapis are basically built to go undetected in the rainforest. Their fur pattern and behaviors make them especially hard to spot. They also reside in a relatively small region in the wild.
Secondly, the first European to even see a portion of an okapi was Harry Johnston (British) in 1901, and all he saw was some pelts. Some Belgian explorers acquired some okapi skulls and skins in the same year. Photographs of living okapis did not happen until the 1920s-1930s.
The native Mangbetu people did indeed call it an “okapi”, but Europeans first heard it called an “atti” by the native Wambutti people.
I’d be interested in finding out what the oldest documentation of okapis by the Congo natives would be, if the okapi did in fact elude even them up until ~150 years ago.
From the Wikipedia article:
"Although the okapi was unknown to the Western world until the 20th century, it may have been depicted since the early fifth century BCE on the façade of the Apadana at Persepolis, a gift from the Ethiopian procession to the Achaemenid kingdom.
For years, Europeans in Africa had heard of an animal that they came to call the African unicorn."
Seems to suggest that though elusive, it was pretty well know in the region.
Thanks for making me learn stuff.
I'm an atheist, but BCE instead of BC is kinda cringe, ngl.
BCE is the standard for all scholarly material. It would be great to have a completely neutral term, at best we have to settle for a de-Christianized one.
Let's just all use the Holocene calendar.
I learned about it in This episode of The Rest is Science with Hannah fry and Michael Stevens from Vsauce, if you wanna learn cool stuff about our calendars...
Still fundamentally linked to the estimate of Christ's birth by Dionysius Exiguus, just with an added +10000. To fully unlink that you'd have to find a date that far back or father to link year 0 to that you're sure about and the farther back you go the harder that is.
Right. But atleast we'd be done with the BCEs.
You're making me wonder what event (that we can precisely date) was/will be important enough worldwide for it to be used as year zero?
This largely misses the point
That is because the point is largely fallacious.
Could you cite your sources? I'd be interested to learn more.
Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%8Cpaki?wprov=sfti1
Thank you.