Aurochs

What do Aurochs cattle look like?

The aurochs was a wild ox, the species from which taurine cattle descend. It stood tall and long-legged, with a body that leaned toward the front: heavy neck and shoulder muscle, an udder so small it hardly showed from the side, and a long skull carrying huge horns. Bulls in the north reached 1.8 metres at the shoulder, cows 1.35 to 1.55 metres, and heavy animals weighed around 700 kg. Bulls were black with a pale stripe of hair down the spine, often called the eel stripe; cows kept a reddish-brown coat and calves began chestnut. Both sexes had a light muzzle. The horns, up to 80 cm long, first swept up and outward, then forward and in, then up again.

Where does the Aurochs come from?

Where the species first appeared is still argued over, with both African and Asian origins proposed. A likely early ancestor, Bos acutifrons, left a skull in India's Sivalik Hills about 2 million years old. The oldest well-dated aurochs fossil, roughly 780,000 years old, came from Tunisia, and other early remains were dug from Saharan rock in the Hoggar Mountains. The animal reached Europe by the Middle Pleistocene, with the oldest accepted records at Ponte Molle near Rome, and was in Britain by about 400,000 years ago. From there its range ran from western Europe across North Africa to India and East Asia. Hunting and a shrinking landscape then cut it back, country by country, until only Poland held wild herds.

What the Aurochs is known for

The aurochs was built as a wild animal, athletic and strongly made toward the shoulders, in the manner of other wild bovines. Bulls grew far larger than cows, one of the clearest size gaps among cattle. Its power impressed early people everywhere: Palaeolithic painters drew it on cave walls, and in the ancient faiths of the Near East the bull became an emblem of strength. Old southern European breeds still echo its look, with dark bulls, pale muzzles and cows of a lighter shade.

How the Aurochs is bred and kept

The aurochs was never a managed breed, but two tame lines came from it. During the Neolithic, aurochs in the Fertile Crescent were brought under human control and became taurine cattle, which spread into Europe through the Balkans and along the Mediterranean coast. A separate domestication on the Indian subcontinent produced the zebu. Wild blood kept entering the herds: aurochs and early domestic stock interbred in the early Holocene, and taurine and zebu lines met and mixed in the Near East roughly 4,000 years ago. That old mixture is why some breeds still carry wild colouring, and horn shapes like the aurochs' survive in the Spanish fighting bull.

What the Aurochs is kept for

As a wild animal the aurochs was hunted rather than herded, and people had dealings with it from Neanderthal times onward. After death almost everything found a use: horns became trophies, votive gifts and drinking horns. The species' greatest contribution came through its descendants. Taurine cattle from the Fertile Crescent and zebu from India together make up virtually all the world's farm cattle, so its real service to farming began only once it was gone. A few primitive breeds still show its old colours and horn shapes today.

The land and climate of the Aurochs

This was an animal of wide open ground. Spreading grassland in the Pliocene is thought to have favoured big grazers, and after the last glaciation its range grew to cover Denmark and southern Sweden by about 12,000 to 11,000 years ago. It lived from Atlantic Europe across Saharan mountains to the humid lands of ancient Sudan and on to China and India. On Sicily and Kythira, cut-off herds shrank into dwarf forms. In the end, loss of habitat and hunting, not cold, confined it to the forests of eastern Europe.

Who keeps the Aurochs

Human dealings with the aurochs reach back to Neanderthals and other archaic hominins. Palaeolithic painters, Neolithic carvers of petroglyphs, Egyptian relief makers and Bronze Age figurine modellers all portrayed the wild bull. Among the last to describe a living animal was Sigismund von Herberstein, writing in the 16th century: he received a culled aurochs in Mazovia and cut a woodcarving of it in 1556, recording a pitch-black coat with a greyish line down the back. Scientists later fixed the species' name: Bos primigenius was proposed by Ludwig Heinrich Bojanus in 1825 after he compared aurochs and domestic skeletons.

Faith and ritual

In the old religions of the Near East the wild bull stood for strength, virility and valour. Its horns were placed in votive offerings and carved into drinking horns, and hung up as trophies. The image travelled widely: painted in Palaeolithic caves, scratched as Neolithic petroglyphs, chiselled into Egyptian reliefs and modelled in Bronze Age figurines. Few animals have meant so much to so many early cultures.

Custom and folk tradition

The name is itself a piece of old lore. Aur and ur are Germanic or Celtic words for wild ox; joined with ohso, the Old High German word for ox, they gave ūrohso, which hardened into aurochs. Latin writers wrote of the urus from the Gallic Wars onward. English speakers built the plural aurochsen by copying ox and oxen. In Poland, where the animal lasted longest, 16th-century writers left the fullest eyewitness accounts of how it looked.

Related breeds and crosses

Every taurine cow and every zebu descends from this species. Three subspecies lived in historical times: the Eurasian, the Indian and the North African aurochs, and Chinese genetic work argues for a fourth, East Asian population. Dwarf island forms once lived on Sicily and Kythira. Primitive breeds, especially in southern Europe, still show the black bull with a pale back stripe, and horn shapes close to the wild original turn up in the Spanish fighting bull.

Numbers, conservation and the herd book

The aurochs is extinct and has been for centuries. Its range shrank steadily through the Holocene as habitat vanished and hunters closed in. The last confirmed animal died in Jaktorów forest, Poland, in 1627, though scattered reports hint that it held on in southeastern Europe for up to another hundred years. Today it survives as bones and DNA: a well-preserved bone gave up its mitochondrial genome in 2010, some 16,338 base pairs, and whole-genome studies have since traced how the Indian aurochs split from other populations roughly 300,000 to 166,000 years ago. In 2003 the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature confirmed the name Bos primigenius for the wild species.

From the Aurochs

Questions people ask about Aurochs

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle
• Genetic characterization and West African cattleFAO, Article

• Aurochs on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data