Hippos have always attracted people's interest. Modern hippos in Walt Disney movies can dance lightly. A stone hippo in a 13th-century church in France has wings. And in ancient Egyptian fairy tales, the hippo was a goddess that guided the dead to the afterworld. Despite their popular appeal, hippos, as well as other animals, have difficulty when their needs conflict with those of humans. The early Egyptians liked to hunt hippos for their teeth and because they were dangerous animals. Amulets to protect babies from demons were made from hippo bones. About 4,000 years ago, there were so many hippos in Egypt that they caused serious crop damage. Egyptian farmers killed them routinely, and by the beginning of the 19th century, all the hippos in Africa had been killed. People used to see hippos fight in the arenas of ancient Rome. After the fall of the Roman Empire, hippos weren't seen in Europe again until a few zoos began to exhibit them in the mid 1800s. All the various uses and abuses of hippos through the centuries have made their population fall greatly. Where they do occur, mostly in national parks, they live in such high density that they make the grasslands bare. This causes other grass-eating animals to go farther for food, and hippos, which can't live far from water, destroy their own feeding grounds. In Africa, hippos became extinct   _  .
around the 1850s in the 13th century about 4,000 years ago in the early 19th century