Domestication of Cattle: From Wild Aurochs to Farm Herds

The domestication of cattle began around 8500 BC in the upper Euphrates and Tigris valleys, where early farmers succeeded in taming the aurochs, a huge and dangerous wild ox. From this small beginning came the taurine cattle of the Near East, Europe and Africa, while a separate domestication in South Asia produced the humped zebu. Cattle went on to provide meat, milk, leather and pulling power, reshaping farming, diets and even human genes.

The aurochs

The aurochs (Bos primigenius) was a wild ox that ranged from Britain and Spain across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa to India and China. Bulls were massive, commonly estimated at about 1.6–1.8 metres (5 ft 3 in–5 ft 11 in) at the shoulder, with long forward-curving horns. Cows were smaller and reddish-brown, while bulls were mostly black with a pale stripe along the back.

People had hunted aurochs for hundreds of thousands of years, and the animal appears in Ice Age cave art, including the great bulls of Lascaux. Julius Caesar described the wild “urus” of the German forests in his account of the Gallic War, noting its great size, speed and strength.

The species survived longest in central Europe. The last known aurochs, a cow, died in 1627 in the Jaktorów forest in Poland, where the animals had been protected as royal game.

Where and when cattle were tamed

The earliest evidence for domestic cattle comes from the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent, in what is now south-eastern Turkey and northern Syria. At sites such as Dja’de el-Mughara on the Euphrates and Çayönü in the upper Tigris basin, cattle bones from around 8500–8000 BC show a gradual reduction in size and a change in the ratio of males to females. Both are classic signs of animals living under human control.

This happened in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period, a time of growing villages, cultivated cereals and recently domesticated sheep and goats. Cattle were the hardest of these animals to bring under control. An adult aurochs bull was strong enough to kill a person, and early herders probably captured calves and raised them in pens.

By about 8500–8000 BC, domestic cattle had also been taken by boat to Cyprus, along with sheep, goats and pigs, although cattle later disappeared from the island for several thousand years.

A tiny founding herd

Genetics has added surprising detail. In 2012 a team including Ruth Bollongino and Joachim Burger analysed ancient DNA from cattle bones found at early farming sites in Iran. Comparing it with modern cattle, they calculated that all taurine cattle alive today could descend from as few as about 80 wild aurochs females.

That small number fits the archaeological picture. Domestication seems to have taken place in a limited area over a long period, probably because handling aurochs was so difficult. Once a manageable domestic population existed, it was easier to spread those animals than to tame new wild ones.

Later, domestic herds did occasionally interbreed with wild aurochs. Studies of ancient genomes show that European and British cattle picked up some aurochs DNA as farming spread, especially from wild bulls mating with domestic cows.

The zebu: a second domestication

Humped zebu cattle (Bos indicus) have a separate origin. They descend from the Indian aurochs, a subspecies of the same wild ox that lived in South Asia. Genetic studies show that the ancestors of taurine and zebu cattle had separated long before domestication, probably hundreds of thousands of years earlier.

The best early evidence for zebu domestication comes from Mehrgarh in Pakistan, where cattle became steadily more important and smaller in size between about 7000 and 5500 BC. Zebu are well adapted to heat, dryness and tropical parasites, and they later spread across India, East Asia and Africa, where many local breeds are mixtures of taurine and zebu ancestry.

Some researchers have also proposed a third, independent domestication in north-east Africa, but the genetic evidence now mostly favours introduced Near Eastern cattle that mixed with local wild aurochs.

Spread into Europe and beyond

Domestic cattle travelled west with the first farmers. They reached Greece by about 6500 BC and central Europe with the Linear Pottery culture after about 5500 BC, during the spread of farming into Europe. By around 4000 BC they had reached Britain and Scandinavia.

At first cattle were kept mainly for meat and hides. Over the following millennia people increasingly used them for milk and, by the 4th millennium BC, for pulling ploughs, sledges and wagons. This “secondary products revolution”, a term coined by the archaeologist Andrew Sherratt, greatly increased the value of each animal.

Milk and human genes

Cattle domestication even changed human biology. Most early farmers, like most mammals, lost the ability to digest lactose (milk sugar) after childhood. In populations that relied heavily on dairy, especially in Europe and parts of Africa and the Middle East, a genetic mutation allowing adults to digest milk, known as lactase persistence, became common.

Ancient DNA shows that this trait was rare among the first farmers and spread mainly in the last 5,000 years or so. It is one of the clearest examples of culture and genes evolving together.

Cattle in early belief and society

Even before domestication, the aurochs held a special place in Near Eastern imagination. Wild bulls are carved on the stone pillars of Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey, built around 9500 BC, and at Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia people set plastered aurochs skulls and horns into the walls of their houses.

Many archaeologists think that feasting on wild cattle, which could feed large gatherings, was socially important. Some suggest that the desire to have such animals close at hand for feasts and rituals, not only for everyday food, helped encourage early attempts to control them. Whatever the motive, cattle remained symbols of power and wealth in later cultures from Egypt and Mesopotamia to Bronze Age Greece.

Timeline

• c. 8500 BC: Aurochs begin to be managed and bred at sites in the upper Euphrates and Tigris valleys.
• c. 8500–8000 BC: Domestic cattle are taken by boat to Cyprus.
• c. 8000–7000 BC: Domestic cattle become smaller and more common across the northern Fertile Crescent.
• c. 7000–5500 BC: Zebu cattle are domesticated in South Asia, as seen at Mehrgarh.
• c. 6500 BC: Domestic cattle arrive in Greece with the first European farmers.
• c. 4000 BC: Cattle reach Britain and Scandinavia.
• 4th millennium BC: Cattle are widely used for milk and traction.
• 1627: The last known aurochs dies in the Jaktorów forest, Poland.

Legacy

Today there are around 1.5 billion cattle worldwide, more than any other large domestic mammal. They provide much of the world’s beef, milk and leather, and in many societies cattle have long been measures of wealth and status.

The aurochs itself still fascinates people. In the 1920s and 1930s the German zoo directors Heinz and Lutz Heck tried to recreate it by crossbreeding modern cattle, producing “Heck cattle” that look only partly like the original. Several modern breeding projects in Europe continue to pursue aurochs-like cattle for rewilding schemes.

Why it matters

The taming of the aurochs gave farmers their most powerful animal partner. Cattle supplied food, clothing, fertiliser and muscle power, making large-scale ploughing and long-distance transport possible. Along with the domestication of sheep and goats, it laid the foundations of livestock farming that still feeds much of the world.