SUBSISTENCE × GENETICS
The Domestication of Cattle
~10,500 years ago
Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Greenlandian
Taurine cattle were domesticated from the aurochs, Bos primigenius, in the Near East about 10,500 years ago. The wild ox is extinct, but its genome has been read from a British bone some 6,750 years old and set against modern breeds, which places the wild animal outside the domestic lineage rather than within it and supports a Near Eastern origin for the European herds. How many animals were taken is a separate question, answered by counting rather than by digging: mitochondrial sequences from fifteen Iranian cattle of Neolithic to Iron Age date, modelled against present-day variation, give a founding stock of around eighty females. So low a number fits a process confined to one area and hard to carry through, wild aurochs being difficult to keep and to breed. Zebu cattle, the humped kind, were domesticated separately in the Indus Valley.
Why it matters
Around eighty females stand at the head of a lineage now herded on every continent, a narrow beginning for an animal of that reach. What followed was no closed line: wild aurochs bred back into the early herds, in Britain and Ireland perhaps through deliberate restocking, and Bronze Age herds of the Near East took in zebu ancestry on a sweeping scale. That last change passed through bulls and not cows, and it coincides with a drought lasting several centuries, which reads as herders picking drought-hardy males to keep their animals alive.
Dating & uncertainty
The figure of 10,500 years applies to taurine cattle in the Near East and rests on archaeozoology as much as on genetics; the bounds kept here, 11,000 to 10,000 years, cover the range of published estimates. The number of domestication events is the live question. Analyses of more than three thousand animals from a hundred and eighty populations favour two, in the Fertile Crescent and the Indus Valley, over three; a proposed third event in the Western Desert of Egypt is explained instead by African cattle crossing with local aurochs. Were that third event upheld, African cattle would have a beginning of their own rather than an imported one.
Sources
- Bollongino et al. (2012), Molecular Biology and Evolution · Modern Taurine Cattle Descended from Small Number of Near-Eastern Foundersdoi:10.1093/molbev/mss092
- Verdugo et al. (2019), Science · Ancient cattle genomics, origins, and rapid turnover in the Fertile Crescentdoi:10.1126/science.aav1002
- Pitt et al. (2018), Evolutionary Applications · Domestication of cattle: Two or three events?doi:10.1111/eva.12674
- Park et al. (2015), Genome Biology · Genome sequencing of the extinct Eurasian wild aurochs, Bos primigenius, illuminates the phylogeography and evolution of cattledoi:10.1186/s13059-015-0790-2
Our species’ history as one day
23:12:0048 min before midnight
if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day