Brindled cow, bold freckled,
Spotted cow, white speckled;
Ye four field sward mottled.
The old white-faced,
And the grey Geingen
With the white bull
From the court of the King,
And thou little black calf, suspended on the hook,
Come thou also, whole again, home.
Twelfth-century Welsh poem
I write anywhere I can. I take my laptop everywhere with me, and I write on trains, planes and in taxis. I write in hotel rooms when I’m off for meetings or filming. I sit in cafes and write, when I’m away in cities. But the place where I feel that writing flows out of me best is at home. I sit in the bay window of the cottage and type away. I can glance up at my garden, filled now with splashes of early-autumn colour – with all manner of domesticated species that I have planted there for no other reason than that they look beautiful. The echinacea and rudbeckia are in flower – like gems of yellow and purple-pink amidst the greenness. My roses are blossoming again, clambering over the rose arch and clinging on to a lingering warmth.
The field beyond my garden stretches off, framed in the distance by copper beech trees – more dark purple than coppery now. And in that green field, dark shapes moving in the morning mist, are the cattle. They hang together in a loose herd, eating and eating their way through the day, tearing up the lush green grass that has grown again after haymaking. They’re all young males. Sometimes startled and rushing from one end of the field to the other. But mostly quite still and serene. I look up as I’m trying to straighten my thoughts out and pull together the threads of this story, and I find their presence calming.
Even though these cattle are actually young bullocks, a few with quite formidable horns, I’ll walk across their field without too much trepidation. They rarely show much interest in humans in their environs – unless it’s the farmer in his truck. Later in the year, as autumn tips into winter, he’ll drive his Hilux into the field and throw hay bales off it. The bullocks will run over to follow the truck, eager for the sweet taste of old hay. They can move fast when they want to. But mostly they are still, or moving slowly, mowing the grass, step by step. I won’t take a path through the herd – that would be foolish. But I’m happy to venture into their field. Only on one or two occasions have I felt intimidated enough by a specific bullock to retreat, slowly, back to the gate and out.
These creatures are huge compared to me – ten times larger and heavier, at some 600 kilograms. Adult bulls can weigh twice that. But the ancient ancestors of cattle – the aurochsen, ‘ur-oxen’ – were even bigger, with the largest estimated to have weighed as much as 1,500 kilograms. You have to respect the audacity of any hunter-gatherer prepared to take that on: not just to hunt these huge animals, but to catch them and try to tame them. The skull of an aurochs on display at the Museum of London, with its formidable, metre-wide pair of horns, makes that moment of sheer, crazy bravery even more astonishing.
Our Ice Age ancestors shared the landscape with these huge beasts. Hunting them is one thing – but how did such an enormous, intimidating animal ever become domesticated?
I drove over the dunes in my old VW van – a Type 25 Syncro equipped with four-wheel drive – and down on to the beach at Formby. This was my trusty camper van, bought from my dear friend and mentor, archaeologist Mick Aston. It was pretty on the inside – I’d painted Hokusai-style waves on the plywood interior. The outside was good-looking too, in bright metallic green. But it meant business: it had a sump protector; it had that four-wheel drive that could get you out of large holes on beaches (tried and tested); its cousins had crossed the Sahara.
And so – with the blessing of the National Trust – I had no qualms about driving my van over the dunes and down on to the beach. I followed the ranger in his Land Rover. The van grunted a little as we drove up the side of a dune; I could feel the power shifting, but the wheels didn’t spin. We were filming there – the very first series of Coast for BBC2. Production had not reckoned on the wind and rain that might blight our filming. The van became a refuge. It was warm and dry. I could even offer the crew and contributors cups of tea, brewed up on the tiny gas hob.
When the day brightened up, we emerged out of the van to survey the beach and plan our capture of it for the small screen. It’s such a vast stretch of sand. It was almost impossible to see to the ends of it.
Formby Beach is the southern continuation of Southport Beach – where, on 16 March 1926, the ex-fighter pilot Sir Henry Segrave broke the world land speed record, in his bright red, four-litre Sunbeam Tiger, nicknamed Ladybird. His top speed was just over 152 miles per hour. Just a month later, the record was broken, but Segrave won it back in 1927, smashing it again in 1929 – this time at Daytona Beach in Florida. The photographs from the race day in 1926 capture the excitement of the moment, with a crowd gathered on the beach. Some onlookers climbed up on the dunes to get a better view of Segrave in his Ladybird.
But it’s not just racing cars that tear up the sand here. Every spring tide brings with it energetic waves which surge right up and crash on the sand, clawing it back, exposing deeper layers of sediment underneath. It was these deep layers that had drawn me to Formby. I’m peripherally interested in raw geology, but when the traces of animals and humans start to appear in these media of sand and mud, silt and stone – that really piques my interest. And this is why I was there – to film those ancient silty sediments, under all that fine sand. A land speed record from ninety years ago was too recent to register. A blink of the eye; just yesterday. What I wanted to see was traces of the past from thousands of years ago. I knew they were here, on this beach.
In March 1989, retired schoolteacher Gordon Roberts was walking his dog along the sandy shore when he noticed strange impressions in newly exposed, deep silty layers. They were the right size and shape and spacing to be footprints. He looked more closely. That’s exactly what they were. Gordon found more and more footprints. He wasn’t completely taken by surprise, as local people knew that these traces turned up from time to time on the beach. But, perhaps rather curiously, no one seemed to have taken much notice of them.
Gordon brought the footprints to the attention of archaeologists, who were able to determine when they’d been formed, using various techniques including radiocarbon dating of organic fragments in the silt. They dated to between 7,000 and 5,000 years ago – an interesting period in our prehistory, spanning that crucial transition from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic in Britain.
The footprints – once exposed by a high tide – would be quickly washed away, remaining only a few weeks at most. Having realised their antiquity and their importance, Gordon decided that he should try to preserve this rare and precious data – and he embarked on a huge personal project: to record the footprints. He drew and photographed them. When he came across particularly well-preserved prints, he would make plaster casts of them. His garage began to fill up with boxes and boxes of footprint casts. When I met Gordon on Formby Beach, back in 2005, he’d recorded over 184 trails of human footprints – both male and female, adult and child. He showed me some of the photographs and plaster casts he’d made. Some contained astonishing detail of toes and the pressure of the footfall. How were such finely moulded footprints created – and preserved for all those years?
The environment around Liverpool Bay, at the time when the footprints were made, would have been very different to today. There were no waves crashing on to the beach at high tide. The sea level was lower and a long sandbar existed, beyond the coast. Behind the sandbar, there was a tidal lagoon and a gently shelving, muddy beach – which would have been largely inundated at high tide, but with gently rising water, rather than high-energy, crashing waves. Pollen analysis conjures up a large area of saltmarsh behind the mudflats with sedges, grasses and reeds, fringing into fen woodland, with pine, alder, hazel and birch. There’s no reason to suppose that our ancient ancestors wouldn’t have enjoyed a trip to the seaside, just as much as we do, but it would also have been a rich environment for those Mesolithic hunter-gatherers to exploit. The archaeology of the area at this time shows a concentration of activity along the coast and river valleys, which drops off inland. This is a familiar picture. Many traces of Mesolithic people are found around the coast, and beside lakes and rivers – it seems that these liminal environments had more to offer hunter-gatherers than the increasingly dense forest of the interior of Britain. At Formby, that thick forest would have started about a mile and a half inland from the coast, with its saltmarsh, mudflats and tidal lagoon.
Looking at Gordon’s plaster casts, I could see how squelchy the mud must have been, to preserve those details of heel, arches and toes. The adult footprints have the splayed toes characteristic of unshod people. But in order for a footprint to have any chance of surviving, the mud can’t have stayed wet and impressionable – it must have baked hard, on a hot day. Then, when the tide came in again, the gently rising waters would have brought a fine layer of sand and silt, to settle over the footprint. Again and again, until it was buried deep under silty layers, sealed and preserved. In the intervening millennia, the dunes moved back and covered the layers of silt containing the footprints. Now the dunes are retreating even further, exposing those deep silts to the raw energy of the Irish Sea – and the layers are being stripped away until the footprints are revealed.
Footprints are rare in the archaeological record, and provide a unique insight into human behaviour. With the help of experts in anatomy and locomotion, Gordon mapped out the ancient visitors to the beach: women walking slowly along the shoreline – perhaps gathering razor clams and shrimps; men running – perhaps hunting; children running around in circles, mudlarking – just like children playing at the seashore today.
But as well as the human footprints, there were animal prints. These recorded the rich bird life of those mudflats – with the prints of birds such as oystercatchers and cranes specifically identifiable. And then there were mammals: boar, wolves (or large dogs), red and roe deer, horses – and the unmistakable cloven hoofprints of aurochsen: wild cattle.
As I walked along Formby Beach with Gordon, on that cold and windy day of filming, more than ten years ago now, we kept our eyes on the ground – looking for freshly uncovered prints. It wasn’t long before we found traces of aurochs hooves. They were hard to miss – they were huge. They were also deep – you could almost feel the great weight of the aurochs pressing its feet down into the wet mud. We both crouched down to look at the print more closely. I’m used to seeing the hoofprints of cattle – the bullocks in the field at home congregate around their water troughs, which become surrounded by a sea of fluid mud when the weather is damp. Sometimes there are days when the weather conditions are perfect for preserving the prints for a short while – a shower to slicken the mud, then hot sun to bake it hard, with all those hoofprints in it. But this aurochs print was easily twice the size of those bullocks’ hoofprints.
As well as being so large, the oldest of the cattle prints at Formby are firmly Mesolithic. So these are not domesticated cattle being driven down to the coast to graze, just as cattle were driven down on to the fens in Norfolk in the Middle Ages. These hoofprints are too early to be those of domesticates – they were clearly, definitely, made by the wild predecessors of our modern cattle.
It was bleak that day on the beach. But beautiful too. We continued to film as the shadows lengthened and the dunes were momentarily bathed in golden light, just before the sun sank into the sea. We finished up, packed the kit into the back of the green van, and I thanked Gordon, before driving off across the dunes.
And Gordon Roberts – he continued collecting his records of the footprints on Formby Beach – making sure those ephemeral traces were catalogued and preserved. He died in August 2016, leaving that legacy behind – a wonderful archive for researchers of the future to delve into. I feel very privileged to have met him, to have walked with him and looked for footprints, on that long stretch of silty sand and ancient mud, by the perpetually shifting dunes.
The appearance of human footprints alongside hoofprints of deer and aurochsen on Formby Beach has led some researchers to conjecture that people were hunting these animals in the reedbeds and mudflats along the coast. Herds of deer and aurochsen – out in the open – would surely have attracted Mesolithic hunters. It seems like an entirely reasonable suggestion, but, unfortunately, it’s impossible to tell if the human and animal prints were made at near enough the same time, on a specific day. After all, I can walk into the field at home and leave my footprints in the mud, hours after the bullocks have moved off.
What’s really surprising, though, is where the prints were found. It’s not unusual to find modern red deer on the coast, but the aurochs has long been thought of as a forest animal. And yet the wild cattle at Formby weren’t just browsing along the edges of the fen woodland – they were clearly venturing right out into the open reedbeds of this coastal, wetland environment. Not the shy creatures of the forest that we once believed them to be, then.
There may be no direct traces of Mesolithic hunters stalking aurochs at Formby, but there’s plenty of evidence at other sites elsewhere in Britain and north-west Europe. Most of this evidence comes in the form of butchered aurochs bones, from numerous Mesolithic sites – including Star Carr in Yorkshire. Earlier, Palaeolithic sites record the same taste for wild beef. And at just a few, rare sites, there’s evidence of the hunt and the kill itself.
In May 2004, an amateur archaeologist in the Netherlands came across a curious scatter of pieces of bone and two fragments of a flint blade, all sitting on the surface of the ground, close to the River Tjonger and the Balkweg road in Friesland. The artefacts had apparently been brought to the surface by the recent digging of a ditch, and the bones had been lying exposed for some time – they’d been bleached white by the sun.
This stretch of the River Tjonger has been domesticated – its wild, winding course has been constrained into a canal. But the artefacts came from a sandy sediment which had once formed the bank of an inside-bend of the river, deep in antiquity. The digging of the ditch had completely destroyed the original site of the bones and flint – they were, in archaeological parlance, out of context – yet they could still provide some useful information.
The bones were from the spine, ribs and feet of an aurochs. They seemed small for aurochsen, but the radiocarbon dates came in at around 7,500 years ago – the late Mesolithic, too early for domestic cattle. The first domestic cattle arrived in the Netherlands at least a millennium later. And the spines of the vertebrae, sticking up from the vertebral bodies like fins, were long like those of aurochsen – much longer than those of domestic cattle. The bones of the feet were also more aurochs-like – long and slender. The final interpretation was that the bones had belonged to a small, female aurochs.
So – a dead, ancient cow. Still nothing much to write home about – except that eight of the bones bore cut marks: evidence of butchery. There were also traces of burning on some of the vertebrae.
Humans had clearly interacted with this carcass. The two fragments of flint found with the bones fitted together to form a single blade – in all likelihood, one of the tools used to skin and butcher the dead aurochs. Like some of the bones, the flint blade was burned. The Mesolithic hunters had lit a fire, perhaps even cooking and eating some of the meat right there, before carrying off the rest of the carcass, including the head.
Balkweg is just one of a handful of sites which record human interaction with what must have been a whole aurochs carcass – a single animal that is presumed to have been brought down in a hunt. There are a couple of other sites in the Netherlands, two in Germany, and one in Denmark, that seem to show the same thing: the finale of a successful hunt. Plenty of individual aurochs bones and fragments of bones also turn up in places where people were living – meat taken home for dinner. But even at these sites, only a very small percentage of the total number of animal bones are ever from aurochsen. Numbers can be misleading. The aurochsen were such huge animals, the meat to be had off one aurochs thigh would have massively outweighed that on the equivalent part of a beaver, badger, boar, or even a deer. And whereas hunters may have brought a whole boar back to the camp for the family to eat, they’re unlikely to have attempted to carry an entire aurochs home. The carcass would have been jointed in situ, dividing up the limbs into manageable portions to transport back, along with the skin of the animal. The hunting sites show that the feet – with slim pickings – were often left behind.
The Balkweg aurochs seems surprisingly small – estimated to stand just 134 centimetres tall at the withers, or shoulders. So she seems, potentially, to have been a less formidable target for those Mesolithic hunters, and she also raises the possibility that many, later aurochs have been misidentified as domesticated cattle, or as hybrids with aurochs – perhaps an easy mistake to make if osteologists look at size alone.
Nevertheless, we know – from the date – that the 7,500-year-old Balkweg cow must have been an aurochs – a member of this ancient species, Bos primigenius, whose huge herds ranged right across Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts, and from India and Africa in the south to the Arctic tundra in the north. Hunted by humans and other predators, the aurochs would eventually go extinct. But there were still aurochsen alive in Roman times. In the sixth book of his epic Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar described these uri – wild beasts inhabiting the Hercynian Forest of southern Germany:
These are a little smaller than an elephant in size, and of the appearance, colour and shape of a bull. They possess great strength and great speed; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have caught sight of. The Germans trap these beasts in pits and kill them. The young men harden themselves with this labour, practising this type of hunting, and those who have slain the most, producing their horns in evidence, are highly praised. But even when very young, these beasts cannot be habituated to humans or tamed.
It’s a fantastic portrait – of the wild Germans of the great Forest, as well as the formidable uri themselves – these untameable, horned monsters.
And yet, of course, we know that some of these magnificent animals were tamed. Although we talk about the species having gone extinct, some lineages survived. The descendants of the aurochs that would make it through to the present day were the ones who became allies of humans. Even as the Balkweg aurochs met her fate on the banks of the ancient Tjonger, on the north-west edge of Europe, some of her cousins in the east had already become domesticated. And not just for their meat and their hides – the same resources that made the aurochs such a prize for the Mesolithic hunters – but for their milk. The relationship between humans and cattle was changing.
We’re all so used to the idea of drinking milk now that it’s difficult to stand back and try to imagine what it was like coming up with the idea in the first place. But if you can manage to shed your familiarity with milk and dairy products, then the idea of drinking another mammal’s milk starts to seem very odd indeed.
Possessing mammary glands, which produce milk, is a defining characteristic of mammals. Milk is produced by females in order to feed their offspring. It’s a brilliant survival strategy – it means that the mother doesn’t have to abandon her infants in order to find food for them. She can stay with her brood and feed them directly from her own body. When they grow older, more capable and independent, they will be able to leave her side and find their own food in the environment.
I think very few people would be comfortable with the idea of pouring human milk on to their breakfast cereal or into their tea – but it’s perfectly acceptable to imbibe the milk of another mammal. And we’ve been doing it for millennia. But who came up with this idea of squeezing milk out of another mammal’s mammary glands in order to drink it?
I suspect that the hunting and gathering forebears of the first farmers had already tasted milk. Nobody has yet found any evidence for humans ingesting milk before the Neolithic, but that may be because no one’s looked, and because it would have been a rare event. Having spent time with several different, modern hunter-gatherer communities, I’ve had a chance to witness just how comprehensively they can approach devouring a carcass. After a successful hunt, it’s not just meat that’s on the menu – offal, brains and stomach contents are all tasty and nutritious. In Siberia, I watched reindeer hunters cutting into the belly of a reindeer they’d just killed, cutting out pieces of the still-warm liver and eating those, raw, while dipping a cup into the cavity to bring out the blood to drink.
Anthropologist George Silberbauer, who spent more than a decade living amongst Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, described in great detail how these hunter-gatherers would utilise the carcass of a hunted antelope – including the udders: ‘The udders of lactating larger antelope are regarded as delicacies when baked over an open fire. If there is milk in the udder, it is squeezed out and drunk before flaying commences.’
A traditional story from the Central Plains of North America suggests that antelope udders and milk were considered to be a prized delicacy amongst hunter-gatherers there too. After hunting and killing a doe antelope, two Kiowa chiefs were said to have argued over who should have the ‘milk bags’. One of the chiefs claimed both udders, and the other chief was so shamed by this affair that he upped sticks and took all his relatives with him, heading off to new territory in the north. The faction apparently became known by a name which translates as ‘Antelope Milk Drags Heart on the Ground Move Off People’. The selfishness of the remaining chief seems too trivial to provoke such a split in a tribe; the story really seems to be about loss of power and prestige – symbolised by that refusal to share the prized udders of the antelope.
With these historical and near-contemporary examples of hunter-gatherers drinking milk from hunted animals, it seems reasonable to suggest that ancient hunter-gatherers would have done the same. They would surely have utilised such carcasses in a similarly thorough way, making the most of this precious resource. It seems foolish to suggest that no one would have tasted milk before animals were domesticated. Milk would not have formed an important part of a hunter-gatherer diet, but neither is it likely to have been completely absent. New advances in archaeological sciences provide us with opportunities to explore the diets of our ancestors, and when it comes to milk, there could be clues lurking in our ancestors’ teeth.
Calcium is essential for healthy teeth and bones, and milk is an excellent source of this element. Like many elements, calcium exists naturally in a few slightly different forms, or isotopes. The ratios of these isotopes can be measured from samples of human and animal tissues, including bones and teeth. Ratios of carbon and nitrogen isotopes have proved to be useful indicators of diet – carbon isotopes can indicate broadly which types of plants an organism ate during its lifetime, while nitrogen isotopes reflect whether the diet was more plant-based or meat-based, and whether it contained marine sources of food. And so, for a while, archaeological scientists held out hope that calcium isotope ratios might provide clues about milk and dairy products in ancient diets. They tested archaeological animal bone and human bone, and found a difference in calcium isotope ratios between humans and other animals. But, rather disappointingly, they found no change within humans, over time. Mesolithic and Neolithic humans – living without and with domesticated cattle, respectively – had the same ratios of calcium isotopes in their bones – so unfortunately it seems that this analysis isn’t going to provide us with any answers here.
Teeth do provide us with another option, though. On the whole, our ancient ancestors had much better teeth than we do today. With less sugar in their diets, they didn’t suffer so badly with dental caries. You see the occasional cavity in archaeological teeth, but it’s nowhere near the epidemic proportions seen in contemporary, Western society. On the other hand, our ancestors were notoriously bad at brushing their teeth. This lack of attention to dental hygiene leads to a build-up of plaque, which, over time, mineralises and becomes very hard. Accretions of hard calculus are often seen on archaeological teeth, and it doesn’t stop there. Calculus leads to an irritation of the gums, and also affects the underlying bone – which starts to shrink back, until, eventually, the tooth falls out. By that point, of course, the tooth is highly likely to be lost to archaeological science. It’s the teeth which end up in the grave, still in situ in old jaws, and plastered with calculus, that are now offering up some exciting clues about ancient diets.
As calculus forms, it traps tiny particles of food within it. At the smallest level, these include starch granules – tight packages of stored sugar – and plant phytoliths – which are microscopic, silica-rich structures that help to provide support in living plants. In the lab, these particles can be analysed and identified. Calculus studies have revealed all manner of surprising details about ancient diets. Thanks to their dirty teeth, we now know that, forty-six thousand years ago, Neanderthals in what is now Iraq were eating cooked cereals, probably barley; that the Easter Islanders ate sweet potatoes; and that people in prehistoric Sudan ate a plant called purple nut sedge, regarded as a weed today.
This is all very well, but what about the presence of milk in human diets? There are no microfossils in milk – but there are highly characteristic molecules, and one of them proves to be an essential clue. It’s milk whey protein, or, more formally, β-Lactoglobulin – BLG. And importantly, for archaeologists, BLG is present in animal milk, but absent from human milk. It’s also relatively resistant to being destroyed by bacteria, so it tends to stick around for a long time. Another useful feature of this protein is that it varies between species – it’s possible to tell the difference between BLG from cattle, buffalo, sheep, goat and horse.
In 2014, an international team of researchers published their work looking for BLG in a range of archaeological samples. They found plenty of BLG in the calculus from Bronze Age teeth – going back to 3000 BCE, from both Europe and Russia – from cattle, sheep and goats – where there’s plenty of evidence for dairying, and none in Bronze Age teeth from West Africa, where there isn’t. So far, so good. This BLG study also cast some light on why Medieval Norse sites in Greenland were finally abandoned. Other studies – of nitrogen isotopes, no less – have suggested that, over 500 years – during a period of deteriorating climate – the Greenlandic Vikings were shifting to eat less food from domestic animals, and more from marine sources, including seals, before finally abandoning their settlements in the fifteenth century CE. Fish bones are often poorly preserved on archaeological sites, and it’s likely that the later Vikings were eating fish as well as seal. Rather than being pathologically inflexible about their diet, as the scientist and writer Jared Diamond suggested in his book Collapse, it seems the Greenland Vikings were trying to adapt. Whatever the reason for their abandonment of the Greenlandic colonies, it wasn’t an aversion to eating food from the sea.
The analysis of the calculus on the Viking teeth reveals another dietary change. At 1000 CE, the early Greenland Vikings were eating plenty of dairy products. But four centuries later, BLG had disappeared. So they weren’t eating domestic animals any longer, and they didn’t even have any access to dairy products. Perhaps the collapse of their dairy herds helped to speed the end for this Viking colony. But it’s also possible that the real reason for the abandonment of Greenland could have been more baldly economic. The Greenlandic Vikings traded walrus and narwhal ivory – but as supplies of African ivory started to enter the market, their goods were no longer so valuable. Time to leave this place, then, as the bottom fell out of the ivory market and where you could no longer even get a nice bit of cheese.
All of this is fascinating, and the newly unlocked potential for using β-Lactoglobulin to reconstruct ancient diets is exciting – but this latest study looked no further back in time than the Bronze Age. Very soon, I imagine someone will go looking for milk whey protein in more ancient teeth, and I’d like to think that very faint traces might pop up even before the advent of domestication and dairying in the Neolithic, amongst the unbrushed teeth of our hunter-gatherer forebears.
Our ancestors didn’t pay much attention to brushing their teeth, and it seems they weren’t that keen on washing up, either. To date, the earliest definite evidence we have of humans drinking milk comes from the fatty residues left on the insides of ancient sherds of pots from the Near East, dating to the sixth and seventh millennia BCE. A team headed up by Richard Evershed at the University of Bristol looked at 2,225 potsherds from south-eastern Europe, Anatolia and the Levant. They found a hotspot of early milk use close to the Sea of Marmara. This study of milk and pottery drags us away from the Fertile Crescent, to the greener and lusher north-western corner of Anatolia. And it made a lot of sense: Neolithic sites in this area contain high proportions of domesticated cattle bones, and this is an area with high rainfall and lush pastures compared with most of the Middle East. The bones tell a story of their own – with plenty of young animals in the archaeological assemblages, the early farmers seem to have been rearing cattle for both meat and milk.
The results of this study of ancient potsherds seem obvious in a way, but until Evershed and his colleagues found those traces of milk fats, it was thought that dairying was a relatively late addition to the Neolithic mode of life, coming along several millennia after the original domestication of animals, and perhaps two millennia after pottery was invented. The new evidence pushes dairying right back – to the same time as the appearance of the very earliest ceramic vessels in western Asia, in the seventh millennium BCE. Is this more than a coincidence? Perhaps needing something in which to store and process milk could even have prompted the invention of pottery.
Nonetheless the earliest evidence for both milk – and pottery – still comes along some two millennia later than the earliest appearance of domestic animals, including cattle, sheep and goats, in the ninth millennium BCE. And with these techniques, clever as they are, it’s impossible to know if milk was used any earlier – because you’re then in a world before pottery and there are simply no potsherds for milk lipids to stick to.
Another frustration with the evidence from milk lipids on pottery is that, unlike milk whey protein in calculus, this time we don’t know which of the possible animals the milk came from – it could have been from sheep, goats or cattle. It may be possible, however, to get to the bottom of that by carefully studying animal bones from Neolithic sites, and an investigation carried out across eleven archaeological sites in the Central Balkans did just that. Analysis of cattle bones from those sites revealed an increasing proportion of adult animals over time. On average, adult animals made up only about 25 per cent of cattle bones in Neolithic assemblages. When numbers of young cattle are high, this suggests a focus on rearing animals for meat. At later, Bronze Age sites, from 2500 BCE onwards, 50 per cent of cattle bones come from adults. The shift towards older animals suggests that ‘secondary products’, such as milk (and perhaps traction as well), are becoming more important. The pattern seen in sheep bones is similar. If this pattern is reflected elsewhere, this would suggest that the first cattle and sheep were domesticated for their meat, and milking of these species came along later. But the goat bones in this Balkan study revealed something different. A higher proportion of adult animals was seen right from the beginning of the Neolithic – which starts around 6000 BCE in the Balkans – suggesting that herders in this region had always exploited domesticated goats for their milk as well as their meat. As soon as they had goats, they had goats’ milk.
And yet some other recently published research prompts us to be cautious about generalising from that Balkan study. There’s good evidence from other sites that cows’ milk was being used right back in the early Neolithic. Once again the clues come from potsherds. This time, it’s all about cheese. The first step towards making cheese involves getting particles of a specific milk protein, casein, to start sticking to each other, creating a protein net which traps fat globules inside it. This mess of coagulated protein and fat is the curds. What’s left behind is a thin fluid containing some soluble proteins – the whey. There are two main ways in which you can transform milk into curds and whey: you could acidify the milk, or you could add an enzyme to it – usually rennet. Heating the milk can also speed up the process.
All of this must have been discovered by accident, by Neolithic farmers trying out new recipes perhaps, or even new storage solutions. Just imagine that you’re a Neolithic farmer, off herding your animals for the day, and you want to take some milk with you. Pottery is great – but a bit heavy to carry around. Instead, you decide to use a bag made from a goat’s stomach. It’s not such an odd idea – bags like this are often used for water. Anyway, you fill it up with milk and off you go. Later in the day, you go to take a sip of milk and something strange has happened – it’s become watery, with lumps. The rennet – the enzymes sticking around inside the goat’s stomach – has transformed the milk. Rather than throw it away, you take it home and show your family. They’re all quite impressed by this brand-new dairy product. But it gets even better. If you can separate the curds from the whey, you’ve got the beginnings of cheese. You could use a cheesecloth, or a metal sieve. Neolithic people may well have used cheesecloths, or even wicker sieves; though, unsurprisingly, neither have been discovered at any archaeological site. Cloth is not generally the sort of stuff that stands the test of time. And, in the Neolithic, metal sieves were still a long way off. But there are plenty of examples of perforated pots, which have been widely interpreted as cheese strainers. Some people have suggested other uses for these pots – ranging from lamps, to honey-straining, to beer-making. Richard Evershed’s team turned their attention to fifty fragments of perforated pots from Neolithic sites in Poland, dating back to as early as 5200 BCE.
They detected lipid residues on 40 per cent of these pottery sieve sherds. And in all but one, the lipids were identifiable as milk fat. It was proof of the cheese-strainer theory – and the first definite evidence of prehistoric cheese. By processing milk, these ancient people had also done the lab scientists a favour: fresh milk residues don’t last long on pottery – but the fats change when milk is processed, and persist much longer. And at these archaeological sites in Poland, 80 per cent of the animal bones are from cattle. While the milk lipids could have come from cows, goats or sheep, it seems most likely that the Neolithic farmers of Poland were indeed milking cows, and making cheese from their milk. The domesticated aurochs was here to stay.
The earliest archaeological evidence of domesticated cattle themselves comes in the form of bones from a pre-pottery Neolithic site called Dja’de-el-Mughara, right on the banks of the Euphrates River. It’s an extraordinary site – an ancient farming village which later became used as a graveyard in the Bronze Age. Deep down in the Neolithic layers, there are a few human burials, but also carved bone ornaments, a large circular building with wall paintings – and the butchered bones of the animals that these early farmers were keeping. There, around the Euphrates, the rolling grassy plains would have provided perfect pasture for early domestic herds during spring and winter. During the parched summer months, the villagers could have driven their animals down to the river’s edge, or even out on to islands, just as they still do today. From the tricky task of managing wild herds – just think of those horns – to capturing a few aurochsen and breeding from them, the farmers had started the process of domestication. Compared with aurochs, the bones of domesticated cattle are smaller, and there’s less difference between males and females. There’s also a difference in horn shape, which is reflected in the bony horn core that projects from the skull. This early, skeletal evidence of cattle dates back to between 10,800 and 10,300 years ago, around the same time that the first firm evidence of cereal domestication appears in the Levant. Sheep and goats, though, are thought to have been domesticated a little earlier – perhaps just a few centuries before. It seems to make sense that domestication of these animals began to happen before the domestication of crops really took off. Pastoralism – tending herds of animals – is almost a halfway house between a nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and a settled, agricultural way of life. But the transition from hunting and gathering to pastoralism could be very swift. One site in Turkey, A¸sikli Höyük, shows a change from people subsisting on a diet including a wide range of wild animals to one where sheep made up 90 per cent of the animals eaten, over just a few centuries. Whatever prompted the pre-pottery Neolithic people at A¸sikli Höyük to manage those flocks of sheep, they effectively ended up with a way of storing meat – creating a walking larder – that made their food sources more reliable.
Early genetic studies suggested that sheep and goats were domesticated many times, in separate places, but all broadly within south-west Asia. In fact, it’s more likely that there was a single centre of domestication for each species – but then plenty of interbreeding with wild cousins. Domestic goats come from the wild goat, Capra aegagrus, while sheep are the domesticated descendants of the wild sheep or Asiatic mouflon, Ovis orientalis. The European mouflon, on the other hand, appears to be a domestic breed turned feral, rather than an ancestor.
It looks like a similar story for cattle. For a long time, it was believed that the two main subspecies of domestic cattle – taurine and indicine – came from separate origins. Darwin certainly thought that may have been the case, writing in the Origin, ‘I should think … that [the humped Indian cattle] … had descended from a different aboriginal stock from our European cattle.’ And to be fair, Bos taurus indicis, also known as zebu cattle, do look quite distinct from Bos taurus taurus, or taurine cattle. Zebu cattle have a large hump above their shoulders, and a long dewlap hanging down between the front legs. They’re also much better suited to hot, dry conditions than taurine cattle. Studies of mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes supported this idea of a separate origin for each subspecies. But a single origin makes much more sense: it seems most likely that domesticated cattle arose in the Near East, between 10,000 and 11,000 years ago, and then spread, meeting wild relatives along the way. Reaching South Asia some nine millennia ago, a significant level of interbreeding with local aurochsen could have introduced zebu genes and characteristics to domestic cattle.
The diaspora of cattle got under way very quickly. Farmers and their cattle were travelling west too; by 10,000 years ago, someone had been brave enough to put them in a boat and take them to Cyprus. By 8,500 years ago, domestic cattle had reached Italy, and by 7,000 years ago, they had spread, with the early farmers, into western, central and northern Europe, as well as Africa. Cattle had reached north-east Asia by 5,000 years ago. As sheep and goats spread out from the Middle East, they were moving into uncharted territory for caprines – there were simply no wild relatives to interbreed with. But it was different for the domesticated bovines: wild oxen ranged right across Europe and Asia, and cattle seem to have interbred with them everywhere. The first clue came from mitochondrial DNA, where unusual variants in Neolithic cattle from Slovakia, Bronze Age cattle from Spain, and in a few modern cattle as well, were all traced back to European aurochsen. More recent genome-wide analyses have revealed widespread interbreeding between domestic cattle and local, wild oxen, right across Europe. British and Irish cattle breeds, in particular, have a lot of aurochs DNA in their genomes. But we can surely only speculate on how deliberate – from a human perspective – any interbreeding may have been.
I’ve spent some time living with indigenous reindeer herders in Siberia, where the domestic reindeer herds are large and impossible to guard or corral. The wild herds are even larger, and – like the domestic herds – often on the move. The reindeer herders I spoke to worried less about wild animals joining their herds, than about losing their reindeer to the untamed hordes. They were always nervous when they knew there was a wild herd nearby. Their experience has made me think differently about those early farmers and their herds.
Just how carefully did Neolithic farmers tend their cattle? Did they fence them in or let them roam more freely? Did they catch and add carefully selected wild aurochs to their herds, or does the genetic introgression simply record unavoidable contact between domestic and wild animals? If this is the case – and I have no idea if it is – then this simply means that aurochs cows were more likely to join up with domestic herds than wild bulls were.
From a biological perspective, it’s not surprising that domestic cattle continued to interbreed with wild populations. The two modern subspecies of cattle have often interbred to produce hybrids. In Africa, cattle DNA reveals a history of male zebu cattle being bred into herds of taurine cattle, to produce Sanga cattle. In China, taurine cattle spread into the north and indicine cattle into the south. This north–south divide is still evident in Chinese cattle today, with taurine–indicine hybrids in the middle. Cattle can also produce hybrids with other species. One Chinese cattle breed has been found to contain yak DNA – and, conversely, domestic yaks contain DNA from cattle. In Indonesia, zebu cattle often interbreed with the local wild cattle species, known as banteng, or Bos javanicus.
When they entered into an alliance with humans, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs changed. In contrast to grains of wheat, which grew larger under domestication, cattle and other animals got smaller. But curiously, cattle – unlike sheep, goats and pigs – then continued shrinking, through the Neolithic, Bronze Age and into the Iron Age. And it was a significant reduction. Archaeologists have been able to quantify the shrinking that took place during just the Neolithic by scrutinising ancient bones from European cattle, where farming got started around 7,500 years ago (5,500 BCE). By the end of the Neolithic, 3,000 years later, cattle were, on average, a third smaller than they’d been at the beginning of farming.
It’s easy to leap to the conclusion that early farmers might have been deliberately selecting smaller, easier-to-handle, animals to breed from. While that may have been the case at the dawn of domestication, it seems unlikely that farmers would have continued to select smaller and smaller animals over the generations and millennia. So why were cattle continuing to shrink?
The results from the careful osteological analysis – of bones from seventy sites across central Europe – allowed the archaeologists to test different ideas about what might have caused this reduction in body size. One possible explanation could be that domestic cattle were chronically underfed – but there are no signs of cattle being malnourished. A decrease in average size could come about as a side effect of a reduction in the degree of difference in size between male and female animals. Yet while there was a reduction in sexual dimorphism right at the start of the Neolithic, that trend didn’t continue as the cattle themselves got smaller. Cattle arrived in Europe some 3,000 years after that initial domestication; and, over subsequent millennia, the bones of European cattle showed a fairly consistent level of difference between males and females – and yet they continued to shrink.
Climate change can also have an effect on the size of animals. Could this be the answer? Probably not, as you’d expect the wild cattle to be affected in the same way as the domestic ones – and they aren’t. Another possibility is that the apparent change in average size of cattle just reflects a changing ratio of female to male cattle. A larger proportion of adult females in a herd would fit with an increasing focus on milk production; in dairy herds, young males are often culled. This seems like a good hypothesis, then – but again it doesn’t fit the evidence. The bones of the Neolithic cattle didn’t show an increasing proportion of female animals. The scientists were doing a good job at rejecting hypotheses. After all that rejection, there was just one hypothesis left – and one which seemed to fit the evidence from the piles of bones perfectly.
The ancient cattle bones from Neolithic central Europe revealed not only a decrease in size, but a rising number of juveniles – suggesting, this time, an increased focus on meat production. Young cattle grow quickly. By maturity, at three to four years of age, the rate of growth slows right down. You don’t gain much more meat by keeping a mature animal alive. So you cull more animals before, or just as, they reach maturity – and the proportion of juvenile bones in the middens around your settlements goes up. On its own, this still doesn’t explain the size reduction in cattle – because this is a phenomenon recorded in adult cattle; the juveniles are disregarded from the sample. But nonetheless, the high proportion of subadult bones is telling us something: in such a herd, many of the cows giving birth to calves will be immature themselves. These cows – able to reproduce but still with some growing to do – will tend to have calves with lower birth weights than their mature sisters in the herd. Smaller, lighter calves tend to grow up to be smaller, lighter cattle. It doesn’t mean that the European Neolithic herds weren’t being milked as well, but meat seems to have been a priority – and one which meant that European cattle were 33 per cent smaller at the end of the Neolithic than they’d been at the beginning. Later on, in the Bronze Age, the proportion of sites with subadults decreased – accompanied by a small increase in the size of cattle around this time. But this was a minor blip: on the whole, cattle continued to shrink right up until the Middle Ages, and it would be some time before they regained stature – and, even then, they were never quite as magnificent as their wild aurochs ancestors.
Cattle also provided services other than milk and meat for our own ancient ancestors. Julius Caesar recorded the cultural importance of the wild aurochsen to the Iron Age people of Germany, and domestic cattle would continue to play significant roles in religious rituals and ceremonial fights. The cult of the bull in ancient Crete seems to have formed the inspiration for the myth of the minotaur. Cattle may have been drafted in as formidable, worthy opponents for heroes and matadors, but their size and strength was useful in a more prosaic way as well. They were the original tractors, used to pull ploughs and wagons. In many less industrialised parts of the world, they’re still used in this way. And sometimes, they’re better suited to the job than a mechanical alternative. It’s impossible to drive a tractor up to the high paddy fields of Longsheng in southern China – but an ox can get there easily, and pull the plough beautifully along the narrow terraces.
The breeding and use of cattle for traction may explain another strange blip against that background trend of diminishing size of European cattle. During the Roman period, European cattle get a bit bigger – as shown by analyses of bones from sites in Italy, Switzerland, Iberia and Britain. Farmers may have been deliberately breeding and trading larger cattle, but the size increase could also reflect an injection of local, wild aurochsen genes. And perhaps larger cattle were particularly sought after at this time – as essential cow-power for the expanding wheat fields of the Empire. Nevertheless, cattle remained fairly small – much smaller than today – until well after the Middle Ages.
Following the initial diaspora of domesticated cattle, with the first farmers, throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, bovine populations continued to shift and blend, as people moved, taking their cattle with them. As civilisations blossomed and empires grew up, flourishing breeds of cattle were transported from their homelands to new pastures.
The mitochondrial DNA of cattle in northern Italy suggests an intriguing link with Anatolia – which seems to date to much later than the original arrival of cattle in Italy. Herodotus wrote about the sufferings of people in Lydia – modern Anatolia – during an eighteen-year-long famine. Eventually, he tells us, a large contingent of Lydians left the shores of the eastern Mediterranean and voyaged to Italy. According to Herodotus, the settlers in Italy called themselves Tyrrhenians – and went on to found the Etruscan civilisation. It’s a rather romantic story, with seemingly very little in the way of other historical or archaeological evidence to back it up. But perhaps the cattle of northern Italy retain a faint genetic memory of an ancient migration from the eastern Mediterranean after all. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA from ancient Etruscan human bones has also been suggested to reflect a link between northern Italy and Turkey. It’s not a clear sign of a migration, though – it may just reflect how well these regions were linked by trade and mobility. But perhaps, just perhaps, Herodotus was right after all.
Trade routes are also reflected in the genetic make-up of modern cattle. Zebu DNA in cattle in Madagascar undoubtedly reflects strong trading connections with India. But some significant movements of cattle, which show up in the genes, followed human migrations around the globe. A relatively recent introgression of zebu genes into African, taurine cattle probably reflects the Arabian expansion of the seventh and eighth centuries CE.
After the Middle Ages, we start to see an increase in the size of cattle – which could either be due to selective breeding, or perhaps an indirect consequence of relative political stability and prosperity in Europe. After all, peacetime means that pitchforks can be used, not as weapons, but for their intended purpose of lifting hay.
The bovine takeover of the Americas started at the tail-end of the fifteenth century. The first cattle to be loaded on to ships at Cadiz in 1493 – part of Columbus’s second expedition to the Americas – were headed for Santo Domingo, via the Canary Islands. Horses, mules, sheep, goats, pigs and dogs also made the trip. And they were soon joined by more – every fleet after that brought additional animals to add to the expanding herds and flocks.
So there were no pre-Columbian cattle in the Americas – at least, that’s the traditional view. However, there’s a very real possibility that cattle may have arrived in North America some 500 years earlier, with the establishment of Viking settlements in ‘Vinland’ – probably Newfoundland. The Norse sagas specifically describe islands off Vinland where winter was mild enough for cattle to graze outside all year round. Still, there’s no evidence that these Viking colonists left any descendants – human or bovine. The colonies were abandoned, and it would be centuries before Europeans ‘rediscovered’ the Americas. And despite the existence of at least one Viking Age settlement, at L’Anse aux Meadows, even the link between Newfoundland and the Vinland of the sagas is still questioned by some. On the other hand, there seems no reason to doubt the well-documented voyages of the Spanish and Portuguese. The Spanish transported cattle to the Caribbean; the Portuguese took cattle with them to Brazil – and these animals were the ancestors of Latin American Criollo or Creole cattle.
During the eighteenth century, British pioneers led the way in systematic selective breeding – and specialised breeds started to emerge. Robert Bakewell bred the large, brown-and-white longhorn – principally draught animals, but also good milkers – while the Colling brothers produced the red or roan British shorthorn, good for meat and milk.
Cattle breeders engineered crosses between particular breeds to bring out desired characteristics. The nineteenth century saw a period of bovine ‘anglomania’ where British shorthorn bulls were bred into continental European cattle. Productive breeds from Holland, Denmark and Germany were also exported to other European countries, and to Russia, to improve domestic herds. Hardy Ayrshire cattle from Scotland were bred into Scandinavian populations. There was a mass introduction of zebu cattle into Brazil in the nineteenth century, to improve the existing herds there. Most of the milk produced in Brazil today comes from Girolando cattle – an indicine-taurine cross. In fact, the founding populations seem to have been part-zebu already – reflecting those already complex connections between south Asia, Arabia, North Africa and Europe. And cattle have done well – extraordinarily well – in their new, New World habitats. In Brazil – home to cattle for less than 500 years – there are now more cattle than humans. Some 200 million people live in Brazil – and some 213 million cattle.
In the second half of the twentieth century, cattle breeding got even more technical, with the introduction of artificial insemination. Some cattle were carefully bred for maximum milk production – such as Holstein-Friesians, now the most populous cattle breed in the world. Others were – literally – beefed up, with traits for heavy musculature promoted through selective breeding. Some cattle were also bred to suit particular environments, from lush green grassland to virtual desert. But it wasn’t all about productivity: aesthetic characteristics were under selection as well. An astonishing variety of cattle emerged – not quite as astonishing as the diversity within dogs, but prodigious nonetheless. From white to red to black and everything in between, short-haired to frankly shaggy, small and large, long-horned, short-horned and hornless – the variation in appearance of modern cattle is nothing short of impressive. Selection has changed over time – we now prefer cows which produce less fatty milk, and black-coated beef cattle are currently fashionable in the US. In the developed world, cattle are no longer needed as draught animals, so selection for strength and stamina, pulling the plough, has receded into history.
But selective breeding over the last 200 years – in cattle as in dogs – has created a paradox: there may be plenty of variation, phenotypic and genotypic, between breeds; within breeds, it’s a different story. This narrowing down of variation has been carried out quite deliberately. For most of their history, domestic cattle were subject to ‘soft selection’ as farmers encouraged reproduction amongst animals that were more productive, or better suited to particular environments. And there was plenty of gene flow between emerging breeds. But over the last two centuries, breeders have focused on reducing the variation within breeds – until even coat colour became consistent. With the tight control over reproduction facilitated by artificial insemination in developed countries, the possibility of interbreeding between cattle breeds was practically eliminated. The result of this restriction on breeding, together with strong selection, is a species which actually consists of lots of separate, fragmented populations. Each one is at risk of all the problems inherent in inbreeding, including higher rates of genetic disease and infertility, and population-wide susceptibility to infectious disease. In the wild, fragmented populations with little genetic variation are the ones which are most at risk of extinction. And yet tightly constrained, industrial breeds may be – in the here and now – more productive than traditional breeds. For farmers, switching from a traditional breed to an industrial breed can be an economic no-brainer. But in the long term, it’s not sustainable. Once a domestic breed has gone extinct, all the ‘genetic resources’ it contained are also lost. Geneticists are worried about the future of cattle – and our own food security – if the fragmentation of populations and inbreeding continues. They’re worried about domestic sheep and goats too, but the situation for these animals differs from cattle as there are several species of each, and wild species still exist as well. Although cattle can hybridise with other, extant bovine species – which might be useful genetic resources in the future – the wild ancestor of cattle went extinct centuries ago.
As the global population of domestic cattle burgeoned, the numbers of wild aurochsen dwindled and dwindled. Once they had roamed right across Europe, into central and southern Asia, and North Africa. But by the thirteenth century CE, the territory of the wild aurochs had contracted until they only existed in central Europe. Aurochsen survived longest in Poland, where they were protected by royal decree, and even fed during the winter, to ensure the sport of kings. But even royalty couldn’t save them in the end. Domestic cattle encroached on the habitat of the aurochsen. Cattle diseases and illegal hunting also played a role. But eventually, their demise was ensured by a lack of interest. In 1627, in the Jaktorów game preserve in Poland, the last recorded aurochs, a female, died.
The loss of these large grazers – especially as it happened relatively recently – is lamentable. There are very few species of ‘megafauna’ left in the world, and a large portion of the blame for their disappearance rests with us humans. In a more selfish way, losing these species also means that we’ve lost them as genetic resources. We can’t inject new hybrid vigour into our cattle populations by interbreeding them with aurochsen. And there are also wider, ecological reasons to regret the absence of these animals in our modern landscapes. Without large grazers, wild places become uniformly forested. Nature becomes less diverse.
And this is why some cattle breeders are attempting to bring the aurochs back to life – at least, they’re trying to create a new breed which will be as aurochs-like as it could possibly be. The breeders of the Tauros Foundation in the Netherlands have chosen several European breeds which seem to retain some ‘primitive’, aurochs-like characteristics – in size and shape, length of horns and grazing behaviour. By breeding these various types of modern cattle together, they are hoping to resurrect the phenotype – the appearance and possibly the behaviour too – of the aurochs. However, recent advances in molecular genetics could mean that it may be possible to do more than breed something which looks like an aurochs on the surface. It may be possible to produce an animal which is, through and through – genetically – an aurochs.
The first step towards doing that is to characterise an aurochs’s genome – not just its mitochondrial DNA, or its Y chromosome, but its entire, nuclear genome. In 2015, a team of researchers did just that, sequencing the genome of a 6,750-year-old British aurochs. Taking a sample of bone powder from a humerus found in a cave in Derbyshire, they were able to extract the DNA and read the code. This animal lived a thousand years before the first domestic cattle reached Britain: it was pure, unadulterated aurochs. And when the geneticists compared this aurochs’s genome with that of modern, domestic cattle, they found clear evidence of later interbreeding between aurochs and domestic cattle. A range of British breeds, including Highland, Dexter and Welsh Black, contained DNA from the ancient, British aurochs population. There was no evidence of interbreeding with this British aurochs in non-British breeds – which is important as it suggests the interbreeding really did happen in Britain, between the local domestic cattle and their wild cousins, rather than happening earlier, in mainland Europe. It adds to the evidence of interbreeding from those mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome studies – so in a way, the ancient aurochs are still with us. Just how much aurochs DNA could there be, knocking around in the genomes of living cattle, from such ancient liaisons? If more aurochs genomes are sequenced, it should be possible to find more breeds which have these recent genetic additions from aurochs. This could be a better way of finding cattle to breed from, to ‘recreate’ an aurochs, than simply looking at characteristics. But both approaches beg the question – what’s the real point of attempting this ‘de-extinction’? Is it to breed a creature which looks like the extinct animal? Is it to create an animal which is, genetically, as close as possible to the original, lost species? Or is it to produce a new breed which could fulfil similar roles in an ecosystem to those performed by the extinct animals? What is most important in this endeavour – looks, genetics or behaviour? While there’s a bit of me that would love the chance to see a real, living aurochs, the opportunity to reintroduce a missing keystone species into a wild ecosystem is a more worthy cause, and a more valid reason for attempting de-extinction.
The Dutch Tauros breeding programme started in 2008 with the explicit aim of creating something as close as possible to an aurochs, for release into wild reserves – to put back what has been lost: to resurrect the natural dynamics of ecosystems. They hope to have something very much like an aurochs, ready to be let loose, by 2025. It’s astonishing to think that large, wild cattle could soon be roaming the rewilded wilderness in Europe. The stately, reddish-brown, long-horned ur-oxen that we know from Ice Age cave paintings could be back in the landscape very soon.