Scientists Used Ancient DNA To Piece Together The History Of An Extinct Cattle Species Featured In Early Human Cave Art
Aurochs are an extinct species of cattle that died out around 400 years ago. They once roamed Europe, Asia, and Africa and were heavily featured in early human art painted on cave walls.
They were domesticated in the north of the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East over 10,000 years ago, creating the first cattle to give us a source of muscle, meat, and milk.
It is unclear exactly why the animals went extinct, but scientists say that human activity or climate change contributed to their demise. The last reported animal died in Poland in 1627.
A team of researchers has pieced together the evolutionary history of the aurochs by analyzing 38 genomes extracted from bones dating across 50 millennia that were gathered from Siberia to Britain.
“The aurochs went extinct approximately 400 years ago, which left much of their evolutionary history a mystery,” said Dr. Conor Rossi from Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
“However, through the sequencing of ancient DNA, we have gained detailed insight into the diversity that once thrived in the wild, as well as enhanced our understanding of domestic cattle.”
Fossils of aurochs in Europe date back 650,000 years ago, which is about the same time that archaic species of humans appeared on the continent.
But animals from the east and west of Eurasia share a much more recent common ancestry, indicating that they migrated from somewhere out of southern Asia.
These earlier traces of ancestry survived in European aurochs. According to Dr. Mikkel Sinding, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the University of Copenhagen, the DNA analyses showed that there were three distinct aurochs populations in Europe.
Brad Pict – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only – pictured above is a cow depicted in a cave drawing
The populations included those from Western Europe, Italy, and the Balkans. This means that aurochs were more diverse than previously thought.
Climate change also altered aurochs’ genomes in two ways. At the beginning of the last ice age, around 100,000 years ago, European and North Asia genomes separated. They did not seem to mix until the world warmed up again.
During the glacial period, European herds were hit the hardest. They lost the most diversity when they moved to the southern parts of the continent.
The sharpest decline in genetic diversity took place when the aurochs were domesticated in the north of the Fertile Crescent over 10,000 years ago, which gave rise to the first cattle. Only a few maternal lineages were passed down to offspring into the cattle gene pool.
“Although Caesar exaggerated when he said it was like an elephant, the wild ox must have been a highly dangerous beast, and this hints that its first capture and taming must have happened with only a very few animals,” Dan Bradley, a professor in Trinity’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, said.
Even so, there was clearly “early and pervasive mating with wild aurochs bulls,” which led to the four separate aurochs ancestries that we still see in domestic cattle today.
The study was published in Nature.
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