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Hidden History: The Story of the Cow [1]
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Date: 2024-12-31
The history of the domestic cattle goes back at least 10,000 years.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
The fourth most-numerous mammal on Earth
There are well over 1000 distinct breeds of Cattle in the world today, and somewhere between 1 and 1.5 billion individual animals, making them, by some counts, the fourth most numerous mammal in existence behind Sheep, Rats, and Humans. Particular breeds have been specifically engineered for beef, some for dairy, some for leather, and some for muscle power. In some human cultures, Cows have been used as money; in others, Cows have been worshipped as sacred. (Technically, a “Cow” is a female Cattle, but most people use the two words interchangeably to refer to the entire species.) There are so many Cattle on the planet that they are having a measurable effect on our climate—Cows release methane gas, which is a powerful greenhouse gas and may be a notable contributor to global warming.
The relationship between humans and Cattle is a long one. When the Homo sapiens species appeared around 300,000 years ago, the Cow family was already ancient. Genetic data indicates that the Bovines, the group containing Cattle, had become established by around 12 million years ago, and that Cattle of the Bos genus separated from their Bison relatives about 2 million years ago. One of the earliest fossil Cattle, a skull of Bos acutifrons found in the Sivalik Hills in India, dates to this time.
The Pleistocene Ice Ages had also begun around this time, and the cooler and drier climate led to the shrinking of forests and the expansion of grasslands which opened up new habitat. The bovines took full advantage, and evolved into large herd-dwelling grass-grazers. By around 780,000 years ago the species Bos primigenius had appeared, with the oldest known fossil remains uncovered in Tunisia. It quickly spread to the Middle East and India and developed into four distinct subspecies. The Eurasian version, B. p. primigenius, reached Italy around 600,000 years ago and became established throughout Europe and Asia. Today this species is known as the Aurochs.
The Aurochs was a huge beast. Part of the “Pleistocene Megafauna”, the bull males stood six feet high at the shoulder and weighed over 3,000 pounds. The horns were almost three feet in span and curved forward. Driven by powerful muscles in the neck and shoulders, they were formidable weapons, and the animals were dangerously fierce in defense. The bulls were glossy black with a light stripe down the spine, and the females were a reddish-brown.
Over time the Aurochs adapted to both open grassland habitat and to thick temperate forests, and ranged over a wide geographic area. When Neandertals reached Europe around 300,000 years ago, the Aurochs were already there, and they became a favored prey item for the human hunters. After modern Homo sapiens replaced the Neandertals in Europe about 50,000 years ago, they too hunted the immense beasts, and left superbly-detailed paintings of Aurochs on the walls of their caves. With a single kill yielding a ton or so of meat, enough to feed an entire band of humans for a month, the reward was worth the high risk of hunting them.
Around 10,000 years ago, after the Ice Age ended and the climate warmed, humans, who had been living as nomadic hunter-gatherers for millennia, now began to settle into permanent villages where they practiced intentional agriculture. By this time the Dog had already been domesticated, and also, likely, Goats and Sheep.
The wild Aurochs was a herd animal, it was a good source of food, and it was strong enough to perform as a beast of burden. All of those things probably made it attractive as a subject for domestication. Because the animal was so widespread and its fossils are fairly common, it was not easy to determine where this domestication had taken place, and various hypotheses were floated pointing to Europe, Northern Africa, the Middle East, India, or China.
By the 2020s, though, technology had reached the point where genetic analysis could be used to answer the question. It was determined that there had been two separate points of domestication. The first of these happened in an area around present-day Anatolia in Turkey. Here, about 10,500 years ago, the first modern domestic Cattle, now known as Bos taurus, became genetically distinct from the wild Aurochs, and the bones found in human trash piles began getting smaller and more delicate, indicating that they were being artificially maintained and were no longer wild. Geneticists concluded that this population began with a founding group that numbered around 80 breeding females. Roughly a thousand years later, then, a second domestication took place, this time in India. It produced another new domesticated species, Bos indicus.
Each of these events went on to produce two separate lineages of domestic Cattle, with the Anatolian line spreading into Europe and leading to “taurine” breeds like the Holstein, Guernsey, and Jersey, and the Indian line leading to the humped “indicine” Zebu and Brahmin and reaching all the way to China and Southeast Asia. The two lineages met each other in the Middle East and Northern Africa, producing a line of mixed hybrids which were then carried down into sub-Saharan Africa.
Almost certainly Cattle were first domesticated for their beef—Cow milk was inedible for humans. Infants produce an enzyme that breaks down the lactose sugars in milk and allows them to easily digest it as a food source, but after childhood this gene stops working and the lactase is no longer produced, so adult humans could not digest milk. But in around 6000 BCE, people in the Middle East discovered that Cow milk could be made into dairy products like cheese and yogurt, which did not contain much lactose and were digestible by humans, and which could also be easily stored for long periods. It opened up an entirely new food source. Then about a thousand years later a mutation appeared in some populations in Europe and in sub-Saharan Africa which allowed those people to continue to produce the lactase enzyme into adulthood and made it possible for them to digest milk—giving them another important source of calories. Today most people of European ancestry are able to drink Cow’s milk as adults, while about two-thirds of the world’s population still remain lactose-intolerant.
After Cattle were domesticated, the Aurochs continued in the wild, but declined steadily. It would become one of the first animal species whose extinction was documented by observers, as human pressure and the steady loss of their forest habitat led to decline. In China and India, there are no Aurochs references found after around 2000 BCE, but there are written records in the Middle East and Libya up to about 600 BCE. In Europe, which seems to have been their last stronghold, there are early Roman accounts of Aurochs, and Julius Caesar described seeing them in Gaul in 53 BCE. One of the last reports in France was in the 9th century CE when Charlemagne was reported to have killed one, and in Germany Aurochs were still being described as late as 1500. The last-known herd of wild Aurochs, which inhabited the Jaktorow Forest hunting preserve in Poland, disappeared in 1627.
Today, there has been some talk about using genetic techniques to “de-extinct” the wild Aurochs, either by extracting its DNA from preserved body parts and producing clones, or by manipulating modern Cattle to extract the Aurochs genes that still lie within their DNA.
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