I had no idea there were bison in Europe.
The provided hyperlink leads to an article about bison being reintroduced in Mexico. Here is an appropriate article about bison being rewilded in the Southern Carpathians:
https://rewildingeurope.com/blog/free-roaming-bison-populati....
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/23/first-impressi...
Also check out Herzog's 2010 documentary "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"
The nonstop gibberish about "AI" bores me to tears. These paintings suggest a different view of what it means to become "conscious".
http://www.tcnj.edu/~library/e-reserve/shestakow/SHESHAAH105...
The European bison is a distinct species from the American bison. In the more distant past bisons were widespread all over the Northern Eurasia and Northern America. They have been preferentially hunted everywhere, so their populations have dwindled and fragmented, becoming isolated, then they have become differentiated.
The European bison is somewhat smaller (because it had been mainly a forest animal) and it had become completely extinct in the wild a century ago.
Fortunately, there were enough captive, which have been bred and then reintroduced in the wild in some of their former territories, e.g. in Poland and Romania.
https://www.eurowildlife.org/news/wisents-in-slovakia-the-po...
I have imagined that europe was always heavily populated, while north america was sparsely populated (allowing endless bison). Might not be that true, maybe europe wasn't that dense, and also disease killed so many when the first europeans arrived.
The European Northern plane just turned more into forest rather then remaining more open.
The "endless bison" in America was actually only during a relatively short period of time. IIRC there was a gap of almost a century between when the Native American population was decimated due to disease, and when settlers of European ancestry headed out west.
During that gap the bison population exploded.
I've been on nodding terms with these guys for some years: