Cattle: Domestication and Development

Abstract

Cattle are a major source of milk, meat, hide, and draught power. In addition, they fulfill roles in religious rituals, festivals, and fighting games. Several species of cattle were domesticated independently. Around 8500 BC, well after the domestication of sheep and goat, taurine cattle (Bos taurus) were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent by taming the now extinct aurochs (Bos primigenius, Van Vuure 2001; Teasdale and Bradley 2012). This is consistent with the high diversity of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in Southwest Asia cattle with haplogroups T, T1, T2, T3, and T5. Independent taurine domestications have been postulated to have occurred in East Asia and Africa, but were not consistent with complete mtDNA sequences, which show that the African T1 and East-Asian T4 haplotypes are closely related to mtDNA variants from Southwest Asia (Lenstra et al. 2014). The ancestral aurochs was recorded to be a large and fierce animal and to prefer a forest habitat within its broad distribution...