An extinct species of cattle—the aurochs—that died out some 400 years ago, would be the perfect animal to “de-extinct,” says Dr. Conor Rossi from Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
“This is becoming less science fiction and more future reality as the years go on,” said Rossi, the author of a study of the history of aurochs with Dr. Daniel Bradley from TCD and Dr. Mikkel Sinding of the University of Copenhagen published in Nature.
“Massive investment has occurred to attempt to ‘de-extinct’ animals like the mammoth; similarly, breeding programs to bring back the aurochs have been building momentum,” he told Newsweek.
“If these projects are possible, the aurochs are a great species to target as we have a perfect species at hand that could be used as a vessel for a de-extincted animal,” he said, referring to modern cattle.
Rossi has investigated where the aurochs originated, using DNA from the bones of ancient animals, dating back 50,000 years and made a number of discoveries.
“DNA from ancient bones provides a snapshot to the past. Imagine you had a phone call with your great-great-great-great grandfather,” said Rossi. “What insight would he have about life hundreds of years ago? That’s what ancient DNA provides to us.
“We can take a peek at what life was like tens of thousands of years ago in much greater detail compared to just looking at the bones.
“One of the biggest mysteries was about how domestic cattle came to be. From our big dataset, we can see in greater detail that the cattle we know today mostly came from a small starting stock of wild aurochs.
“We can see that early farmers over 10,000 years ago selected a small group of aurochs to domesticate, perhaps because they were more docile than average.”
Why Did the Aurochs Go Extinct?
The aurochs roamed across Europe, Asia and Africa for hundreds of thousands of years. They were domesticated by prehistoric humans and this provided our ancestors with a vital source of muscle, meat and milk.
Scientists say it’s not fully clear why they went extinct, and the last reported animal died in Poland in 1627, with either human activity or a change in the climate being the main suspects in the demise of the creatures.
“It is likely that farmers occupying the same niche led to intense pressure for the aurochs as their habitat rapidly disappeared,” said Rossi. “More recently, the prestige of hunting aurochs likely pushed them to total extinction.”
Rossi said that before aurochs are brought back to life, he would like to see more effort put into saving species that exist.
“There are many species that are gravely threatened. I would like to see these species protected before we broach bringing back the aurochs,” he said.
Aurochs in Cave Paintings
In Europe, fossils of aurochs dating back 650,000 years have been identified, which is about the time the first archaic species of human appeared on the continent.
An ancient image of an auroch drawn in Altamira Cave in Spain. The animals would be perfect to “de-extinct,” says Dr. Conor Rossi from Trinity College Dublin.
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Aurochs clearly featured in the minds of prehistoric humans, as seen by their depiction in cave paintings in places such as Altamira in northern Spain, and they were even mentioned in Roman times by Julius Caesar.
“Although Caesar exaggerated when he said it was like an elephant, the wild ox must have been a highly dangerous beast and this hints that its first capture and taming must have happened with only a very few animals,” said Bradley of TCD’s School of Genetics and Microbiology, the lead researcher on the study.
“The aurochs went extinct approximately 400 years ago, which left much of their evolutionary history a mystery,” said Rossi.
The aurochs were domesticated in the north of the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East just over 10,000 years ago, to give rise to the first cattle.
References
Rossi, C., Sinding, M-H.S., Mullin, V.E. et al. The genomic natural history of the aurochs. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08112-6
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