Aurochs
The aurochs (Bos primigenius) was a huge wild ox that lived across Europe, Asia and North Africa and is the wild ancestor of all domestic cattle. Bulls stood up to about 180 centimeters at the shoulder, were black with a pale stripe down the back, and carried long horns that curved forward and up, while cows were smaller and reddish brown. It lived in river valleys, wetlands, open woodland and forest edges, grazing grass and browsing leaves. People painted it in caves such as Lascaux and Chauvet more than 17,000 years ago, and about 10,500 years ago farmers in the Near East began to tame it, which gave rise to taurine cattle; the zebu came from the Indian aurochs of South Asia. Hunting, forest clearing and the spread of livestock slowly erased it. By the late Middle Ages the last herd survived in Poland's Jaktorów Forest under royal protection, where a 1564 inspection found 38 animals. The last known aurochs, a cow, died there in 1627, and the IUCN lists the species as Extinct. Its head appears on Moldova's coat of arms, and breeders today try to recreate aurochs-like cattle for rewilding.
What was an aurochs?
The aurochs was a wild species of cattle, one of the largest plant eating animals of Europe after the last Ice Age, and the direct wild ancestor of every domestic cow, bull and ox alive today. Its scientific name is Bos primigenius, which means the first born ox, and it belongs to the same genus as yaks, gaur and domestic cattle. The word aurochs comes from German, where Auerochs combines an old word for wild ox, ur, with Ochs, ox. The same root gave the Latin urus, the Spanish uro, the Polish tur and the Lithuanian tauras, and the word aurochs is used in English for both one animal and several. Scientists recognize three main forms that lived in different regions: the Eurasian aurochs, which ranged across Europe and northern Asia, the Indian aurochs of South Asia, and the North African aurochs. The aurochs is now extinct. It disappeared from most of its range thousands of years ago, and the last known animal died in Poland in 1627. The IUCN Red List lists it as Extinct. Because it was so important to people, as prey, as a sacred animal and as the origin of cattle, it remains one of the best known extinct animals in the world, even though most people have never seen a picture of a real one.
How big was an aurochs?
The aurochs was much bigger than most modern cattle. Bulls stood up to about 180 centimeters at the shoulder and cows up to about 155 centimeters, and the animals of northern Europe, such as those of Germany and Denmark, were larger than those of the south; Hungarian aurochs, for example, reached only about 160 centimeters. Weight can only be estimated from bones, and most estimates put large bulls at around 700 to 1,000 kilograms, with some sources suggesting more. Compared with domestic cattle, the aurochs had longer legs, a longer, narrower skull, a more athletic body and a strong neck and shoulders. Its horns were its most striking feature: long and thick, they grew out to the sides, then curved forward and up, and could reach about 80 centimeters in length. Bulls were black or very dark brown with a narrow pale stripe along the spine and a light colored muzzle, and cows and calves were reddish brown. Julius Caesar, who heard about the aurochs in the forests of Germany, wrote that it was only a little smaller than an elephant, very strong and fast, and that it spared neither people nor animals it caught sight of. That is an exaggeration, but it shows how impressive the animal was.
Where did the aurochs live?
At its peak the aurochs had one of the largest ranges of any large mammal in the Old World. The Eurasian form lived from Great Britain, southern Scandinavia and Spain across Europe to the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, China and Korea. The Indian aurochs lived in the Indian subcontinent, and the North African aurochs in the lands along the Mediterranean coast of Africa and the Nile valley, where it was hunted by the pharaohs. It never reached Ireland, which was cut off by the sea before it could arrive. Studies of its bones and teeth suggest it was a flexible feeder. It preferred river valleys, floodplains, marshes and open, park like woodland, grazing grass and sedges, but when people pushed into the open lowlands it retreated into denser forest and browsed more leaves and twigs. Where it lived alongside early farmers, it competed with their cattle for the best grazing. The range shrank as farming spread: the aurochs disappeared from Britain around 3,500 years ago and from much of western and southern Europe in ancient times, and from the Middle Ages onward it survived only in the forests of central and eastern Europe, until its last refuge in the Jaktorów Forest, west of Warsaw in Poland.
The aurochs and domestic cattle
Every domestic cow descends from the aurochs. Genetic studies show that it was tamed at least twice. The first and best documented domestication happened in the Near East, in the region of today's Turkey, Syria and Iraq, around 10,500 years ago, from a fairly small number of wild animals. That gave rise to taurine cattle, Bos taurus, the humpless cattle of Europe, the Near East and much of the world. A separate domestication of the Indian aurochs in South Asia, with early evidence from Mehrgarh in today's Pakistan, produced the humped zebu cattle, which are well suited to heat. Some researchers have proposed further domestications or local mixing in Africa and East Asia, and ancient DNA shows that wild aurochs bulls sometimes bred with early domestic herds in Europe, leaving traces of wild aurochs DNA in modern breeds. Taming such a large, strong animal was a huge step for humanity. Cattle gave people milk, meat, leather and, as oxen, the power to pull plows and carts, which changed farming, transport and trade. Over thousands of years, people selected calmer, smaller animals, so domestic cattle became much smaller than their wild ancestor, with shorter horns and a wider range of colors.
Aurochs in cave paintings
The aurochs is one of the great subjects of prehistoric art. In the cave of Lascaux in southwestern France, painted around 17,000 years ago, the Hall of the Bulls is dominated by huge black aurochs, and one of them is more than 5 meters long, among the largest animal figures known in cave art. In Chauvet Cave, also in France and more than 30,000 years old, the famous wall painting with horses, rhinoceroses and aurochs shows the animals overlapping in a scene full of movement. Aurochs also appear in many other caves and rock shelters in France, Spain and Italy, often next to horses, deer and bison. It is easy to confuse the two: the famous painted ceiling of Altamira, in Spain, shows mostly steppe bison, not aurochs. The difference is in the shape. Aurochs are drawn with long legs, a straighter back and forward curving horns, while bison have a big hump, a heavy head and short, upturned horns. Outside Europe, aurochs appear in rock art across North Africa and the Near East, on glazed bricks of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, and in Egyptian temple reliefs showing Ramesses III hunting wild bulls. These images helped scientists, and later breeders, imagine what the living animal looked like.
When and why did the aurochs go extinct?
The aurochs went extinct in 1627, when the last known animal, a cow, died in the Jaktorów Forest in Masovia, Poland. Its disappearance was slow. As farming spread across Europe and Asia over thousands of years, people cleared the forests and floodplains where it lived, hunted it for meat, hides and sport, and filled its pastures with domestic cattle, which competed for food and could pass on diseases. In most of Europe it was gone by the Middle Ages. In Poland the aurochs became royal game, and only the king could hunt it. King Sigismund I the Old placed the last herd under special protection, with gamekeepers who watched and fed the animals and villages that were excused from taxes in exchange for looking after them. It was not enough. Royal inspections recorded the decline: in 1564 the gamekeepers counted 38 animals, and by the 1620s only a single cow was left, which died in 1627. The aurochs is often cited as one of the first extinctions in which people tried, and failed, to save a species, and today a memorial stone in Jaktorów marks the place where the last aurochs lived.
Can the aurochs be brought back?
The aurochs cannot truly be brought back, because no living animal carries its complete genome, but several projects have tried to breed cattle that look and behave like it. The first were the German zoo directors Heinz and Lutz Heck, who in the 1920s and 1930s crossed different cattle breeds, guided by skulls and cave paintings. The result, Heck cattle, still exists, but it is smaller and differently shaped than the aurochs, and the project is remembered partly for its links to the Nazi regime: Lutz Heck was a party member and a hunting friend of Hermann Göring. Modern efforts use genetics. The Tauros Programme, started in the Netherlands in 2008 by the Taurus Foundation and later supported by Rewilding Europe, crosses old, hardy breeds that kept aurochs traits, such as Sayaguesa and Maronesa from Spain and Portugal and Podolian cattle from Italy and the Balkans, chosen with the help of a 2016 genomic study that ranked 34 breeds by their similarity to the aurochs. Its herds graze in rewilding areas in Spain, Portugal, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Romania and the Netherlands. The German Auerrind Project follows a similar path. The aim is an animal that can do the aurochs' job in nature: grazing that keeps landscapes open and full of life.
The aurochs in history and heraldry
Long after it vanished from most of its range, the aurochs kept a strong place in human culture. In the ancient Near East wild bulls were symbols of strength and of gods, and the aurochs appears on the Ishtar Gate of Babylon and in the hunting scenes of Assyrian kings and Egyptian pharaohs. Many scholars think the re'em, a powerful horned animal mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and later translated as unicorn, was the aurochs. In Roman times Julius Caesar described how young men in the forests of Germany trapped aurochs in pits, and how its horns, edged with silver, were used as drinking cups at feasts. In medieval Europe aurochs horns were valued as drinking and hunting horns, and hunting the animal was a privilege of kings and nobles. Its head became a heraldic symbol. The aurochs head, with a star between its horns, is the emblem of the historical region of Moldavia and appears on the coat of arms of the Republic of Moldova, which is why the site shows it as Moldova's national animal. Similar bull heads appear in the arms of other towns and families in central and eastern Europe. In Poland, the word tur still survives in place names and expressions about great strength.
