Aurochs | Animal Database | Fandom powered by Wikia Extinct The aurochs, also urus, ure (Bos primigenius), the ancestor of domestic cattle, is an extinct type of large wild cattle that inhabited Europe, Asia and North Africa; they survived in Europe until the last recorded aurochs, a female, died in the Jaktorów Forest, Poland in 1627. During the Neolithic Revolution, which occurred during the early Holocene, there were at least two aurochs domestication events: one related to the Indian subspecies, leading to zebu cattle; the other one related to the Eurasian subspecies, leading to taurine cattle. Other species of wild bovines were also domesticated, namely the wild water buffalo, gaur, and banteng. In modern cattle, numerous breeds share characteristics of the aurochs, such as a dark colour in the bulls, with a light eel stripe along the back with the cows being lighter, or a typical aurochs-like horn shape. Contents Edit The aurochs was variously classified as Bos primigenius, Bos taurus, or, in old sources, Bos urus.

However, in 2003, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature "conserved the usage of 17 specific names based on wild species, which are pre-dated by or contemporary with those based on domestic forms", confirming Bos primigenius for the aurochs. Taxonomists who consider domesticated cattle a subspecies of the wild aurochs should use B. primigenius taurus; those who consider domesticated cattle to be a separate species may use the name B. taurus, which the Commission has kept available for that purpose. Etymology Edit The words aurochs, urus, and wisent have all been used synonymously in English. However, the extinct aurochs/urus is a completely separate species from the still-extant wisent, also known as European bison. The two were often confused, and some 16th-century illustrations of aurochs and wisents have hybrid features. The word urus (/ˈjʊərəs/; plural uruses) is a Latin word, but was borrowed into Latin from Germanic (cf. Old English/Old High German ūr, Old Norse úr).

In German, OHG ūr was compounded with ohso "ox", giving ūrohso, which became early modern Aurochs. The modern form is Auerochs. The word aurochs was borrowed from early modern German, replacing archaic urochs, also from an earlier form of German. The word is invariable in number in English, though sometimes back-formed singular auroch and innovated plural aurochses occur. The use in English of the plural form aurochsen is nonstandard, but mentioned in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. It is directly parallel to the German plural and recreates by analogy the same distinction as English ox vs. oxen. Evolution Edit During the Pliocene, the colder climate caused an extension of open grassland, which led to the evolution of large grazers, such as wild bovines.[8] Bos acutifrons is an extinct species of cattle sometimes claimed to be the ancestor of aurochs, but it was a species with very long, outward-facing horns. The oldest aurochs remains have been dated to about 2 million years ago, in India. The Indian subspecies was the first to appear.

During the Pleistocene, the species migrated west into the Middle East (western Asia) as well as to the east. They reached Europe about 270,000 years ago. The South Asian domestic cattle, or zebu, descended from Indian aurochs at the edge of the Thar Desert; the zebu is resistant to drought. Domestic yak, gayal and Javan cattle do not descend from aurochs. Subspecies Edit Three wild subspecies of aurochs are recognized. Only the Eurasian subspecies survived until recent times. The Indian Aurochs (Bos primigenius namadicus) once inhabited India. It was the first subspecies of the aurochs to appear, at 2 million years ago, and from about 9,000 years ago (BP), it was domesticated as the zebu cattle. Fossil remains indicate there were wild Indian aurochs besides domesticated zebu cattle in Gujarat and the Ganges area until about 4,000-5,000 years ago. Remains from wild aurochs, 4,400 years old, are clearly identified from Karnataka in south India.

The Eurasian Aurochs (Bos primigenius primigenius) once ranged across the steppes and taigas of Europe, Siberia, and Central Asia. It is noted as part of the Pleistocene megafauna, and declined in numbers along with other megafauna species by the end of Pleistocene. The Eurasian aurochs were domesticated into modern taurine cattle breeds around the 6th millennium BC in the Middle East, and possibly also at about the same time in the Far East. Aurochs were still widespread in Europe during the time of the Roman Empire, when they were widely popular as a battle beast in Roman arenas. Excessive hunting began and continued until the species was nearly extinct. By the 13th century, aurochs existed only in small numbers in Eastern Europe, and the hunting of aurochs became a privilege of nobles, and later royal households. The aurochs were not saved from extinction, and the last recorded live aurochs, a female, died in 1627 in the Jaktorów Forest, Poland from natural causes.

Aurochs were found to have lived on the island of Sicily, having migrated via a land bridge from Italy. After the disappearance of the land bridge, Sicilian aurochs evolved to be 20% smaller than their mainland relatives. The North African Aurochs (Bos primigenius africanus) once lived in the woodland and shrubland of North Africa. It descended from Aurochs populations migrating from the Middle East. The North African aurochs was morphologically very similar to the Eurasian subspecies, so that this taxon may exist only in a biogeographic sense. However there is evidence that it was genetically distinct from the Eurasian subspecies. Depictions indicate that North African aurochs may have had a light saddle marking on its back. This subspecies may have been extinct prior to the Middle Ages. Description Edit The appearance of the aurochs has been reconstructed from skeletal material, historical descriptions and contemporaneous depictions, such as cave paintings, engravings or Sigismund von Herberstein’s illustration. The work by Charles Hamilton Smith is a copy of a painting owned by a merchant in Augsburg, which may date to the 16th century.

Scholars have proposed that Smith's illustration was based on a cattle/aurochs hybrid, or an aurochs-like breed. The aurochs was depicted in prehistoric cave paintings and described in Julius Caesar's The Gallic War. Size Edit The aurochs was one of the largest herbivores in postglacial Europe, comparable to the wisent, the European bison. The size of an aurochs appears to have varied by region: in Europe, northern populations were bigger on average than those from the south. For example, during the Holocene, aurochs from Denmark and Germany had an average height at the shoulders of 155–180 cm (61–71 in) in bulls and 135–155 cm (53–61 in) in cows, while aurochs populations in Hungary had bulls reaching 155–160 cm (61–63 in). The body mass of aurochs appeared to have showed some variability.

Some individuals were comparable in weight to the wisent and the banteng, reaching around 700 kg (1,500 lb), whereas those from the late-middle Pleistocene are estimated to have weighed up to 1,500 kg (3,300 lb), as much as the largest gaur (the largest extant bovid). The sexual dimorphism between bull and cow was strongly expressed, with the cows being significantly shorter than bulls on average. Horns Edit Because of the massive horns, the frontal bones of aurochs were elongated and broad. The horns of the aurochs were characteristic in size, curvature and orientation. They were curved in three directions: upwards and outwards at the base, then swinging forwards and inwards, then inwards and upwards. Aurochs horns could reach 80 cm (31 in) in length and between 10 and 20 cm (3.9 and 7.9 in) in diameter. The horns of bulls were larger, with the curvature more strongly expressed than in cows. The horns grew from the skull at a 60° angle to the muzzle, facing forwards.

Body shape Edit The body shape of the aurochs was strikingly different from many modern cattle breeds. For example, the legs were considerably longer and more slender, resulting in a shoulder height that nearly equalled the trunk length. The skull, carrying the large horns, was substantially larger and more elongated than in most cattle breeds. As in other wild bovines, the body shape of the aurochs was athletic and, especially in bulls, showed a strongly expressed neck and shoulder musculature. Even in carrying cows, the udder was small and hardly visible from the side; this feature is equal to that of other wild bovines. Coat colour Edit The coat colour of the aurochs can be reconstructed by using historical and contemporary depictions. In his letter to Conrad Gesner (1602), Anton Schneeberger describes the aurochs, a description that agrees with cave paintings in Lascaux and Chauvet. Calves were born a chestnut colour. Young bulls changed their coat colour at a few months' old to a very deep brown or black, with a white eel stripe running down the spine. Cows retained the reddish-brown colour. Both sexes had a light-coloured muzzle.

Some North African engravings show aurochs with a light-colored "saddle" on the back, but otherwise there is no evidence of variation in coat colour throughout its range. A passage from Mucante (1596), describing the “wild ox” as gray, but is ambiguous and may refer to the wisent. Egyptian grave paintings show cattle with a reddish-brown coat colour in both sexes, with a light saddle, but the horn shape of these suggest that they may depict domestic cattle. Remains of aurochs hair were not known until the early 1980s. Colour of forelocks Edit Some primitive cattle breeds display similar coat colours to the aurochs, including the black colour in bulls with a light eel stripe, a pale mouth, and similar sexual dimorphism in colour. A feature often attributed to the aurochs is blond forehead hairs. Historical descriptions tell that the aurochs had long and curly forehead hair, but none mentions a certain colour for it. Cis van Vuure (2005) says that, although the color is present in a variety of primitive cattle breeds, it is probably a discolouration that appeared after domestication.

The gene responsible for this feature has not yet been identified. Zebu breeds show lightly coloured inner sides of the legs and belly, caused by the so-called Zebu-tipping gene. It has not been tested if this gene is present in remains of the wild form of the zebu, the Indian aurochs. Ecology and behaviour Edit Like many bovids, aurochs formed herds for at least one part of the year. These probably did not number much more than thirty, and were probably composed of cows with their calves and some young bulls. Older bulls probably wandered solely or in small bull herds outside the mating season. If aurochs had similar social behaviour as their descendents, social status was gained through displays and fights, in which cows engaged as well as bulls. As in other wild cattle, ungulates that form unisexual herds, there was considerable sexual dimorphism. Ungulates that form herds containing animals of both sexes, such as horses, have more weakly developed sexual dimorphism. During the mating season, which probably took place during the late summer or early autumn, the bulls had severe fights, and evidence from the forest of Jaktorów shows these could lead to death.

In autumn, aurochs fed up for the winter and got fatter and shinier than during the rest of the year, according to Schneeberger. Calves were born in spring. The mother stayed at the calf's side until it was strong enough to join and keep up with the herd on the feeding grounds. Calves were vulnerable to wolves, while healthy adult aurochs probably did not have to fear these predators. In prehistoric Europe, North Africa and Asia, big cats, like lions and tigers, and hyenas were additional predators that probably preyed on aurochs. Historical descriptions, like Caesar’s De Bello Gallico or Schneeberger, tell that aurochs were swift and fast, and could be very aggressive. According to Schneeberger, aurochs were not concerned when a man approached. But, teased or hunted, an aurochs could get very aggressive and dangerous, and throw the teasing person into the air, as he described in a 1602 letter to Gesner. Habitat Edit There is no consensus concerning the habitat of the aurochs.

While some authors think that the habitat selection of the aurochs was comparable to the African Forest Buffalo, others describe the species as inhabiting open grassland and helping maintain open areas by grazing, together with other large herbivores. With its hypsodont jaw, the aurochs was probably a grazer and had a food selection very similar to domestic cattle. It was not a browser like many deer species, nor a semi-intermediary feeder like the wisent. Comparisons of the isotope levels of Mesolithic aurochs and domestic cattle bones showed that aurochs probably inhabited wetter areas than domestic cattle. Schneeberger describes that, during winter, the aurochs ate twigs and acorns in addition to grasses. After the beginning of the Common Era, the habitat of aurochs became more fragmented because of the steadily growing human population. During the last centuries of its existence, the aurochs was limited to remote regions, such as floodplain forests or marshes, where there were no competing domestic herbivores and less hunting pressure.

Relationship with humans Edit The aurochs, which ranged throughout much of Eurasia and Northern Africa during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, is widely accepted as the wild ancestor of modern cattle. Archaeological evidence shows that domestication occurred independently in the Near East and the Indian subcontinent between 10,000–8,000 years ago, giving rise to the two major domestic taxa observed today: humpless Bos taurus (taurine) and humped Bos indicus (zebu), respectively. This is confirmed by genetic analyses of matrilineal mitochondrial DNA sequences, which reveal a marked differentiation between modern Bos taurus and Bos indicus haplotypes, demonstrating their derivation from two geographically and genetically divergent wild populations. It is possible that there was a third domestication event from another form of the Aurochs in Africa. The Sanga cattle, a not-humped zebu like cattle type, is commonly believed to originate from crosses beween humped-zebus with taurine cattle breeds. However, there is archaeological evidence that these cattle were domesticated independently in Africa and that bloodlines of taurine and zebu cattle were introduced only within the last few hundreds years.

Domestication of the aurochs began in the southern Caucasus and northern Mesopotamia from about the 6th millennium BC. Genetic evidence suggests that aurochs were independently domesticated in India and possibly also in northern Africa. Domesticated cattle and aurochs are so different in size that they have been regarded as separate species; however, large ancient cattle and aurochs "are difficult to classify because morphological traits have overlapping distributions in cattle and aurochs and diagnostic features are identified only in horn and some cranial element." A DNA study suggests that all domesticated taurine cattle originated from about 80 wild aurochs. Those animals lived in Iran 10,500 years ago. Comparison of aurochs bones with those of modern cattle has provided many insights about the aurochs. Remains of the beast, from specimens believed to have weighed more than a ton, have been found in Mesolithic sites around Goldcliff, Wales. Though aurochs became extinct in Britain during the Bronze age, analysis of bones from aurochs that lived at about the same time as domesticated cattle showed no genetic contribution to modern breeds.

As a result of this study, modern European cattle were thought to have descended directly from the Near East domestication. Another study found distinct similarities between modern breeds and Italian aurochs specimens, which suggested that the previously tested British aurochs were not a good model of the diversity of aurochs genetics. It also suggests possible North African and European aurochs contributions to domestic breeds. Further genetic tests have shown that domestic cattle in Europe are of Near Eastern origin. This indicates that the European aurochs was not domesticated, nor did it interbreed with the imported Near Eastern cattle. Indian cattle (zebu), although domesticated eight to ten thousand years ago, are related to aurochs that diverged from the Near Eastern ones some 200,000 years ago. African cattle are thought to have descended from aurochs more closely related to the Near Eastern ones. The Near East and African aurochs groups are thought to have split some 25,000 years ago, probably 15,000 years before domestication.

The "Turano-Mongolian" type of cattle now found in Northern China, Mongolia, Korea and Japan may represent a fourth domestication event (and a third event among Bos taurus–type aurochs). This group may have diverged from the Near East group some 35,000 years ago. Whether these separate genetic populations would have equated to separate subspecies is unclear. The maximum range of the aurochs was from Europe (excluding Ireland and northern Scandinavia), to northern Africa, the Middle East, India and Central Asia. Until at least 3,000 years ago, the aurochs was also found in Eastern China, where it is recorded at the Dingjiabao Reservoir in Yangyuan County. Most remains in China are known from the area east of 105° E, but the species has also been reported from the eastern margin of the Tibetan plateau, close to the Heihe River. "Primitive" breeds Edit Because some cattle breeds have been changed more than other breeds, certain breeds bear a greater resemblance to the aurochs. These breeds are not very productive from the economical point of view, as they do not give as much milk or meat as others.

Most of the "primitive" phenotypes are facing extinction, because farmers give them up for economic reasons or crossbreed them with more productive dairy and meat cattle. Very hardy and robust, the primitive breeds are sometimes used in nature conservation programs, where they can fill the place of their wild ancestor in the ecology. Some have been integrated into the TaurOs Project, whose goal is to breed a cattle type phenotypically, genotypically and ecologically as close to the aurochs as possible. Primitive breeds include, for example: Caldela, Heck cattle, Limia Cattle, Maremmana primitivo, Maronesa, Pajuna Cattle, Rhodopian Shorthorn, Sayaguesa Cattle, Spanish Fighting Bull and Tudanca Cattle. Tudanca Cattle is a primitive Iberian cattle breed. Spanish Fighting Bulls resemble the aurochs often in body shape, horn shape and coat colour. Sayaguesa Cattle cows in the Netherlands (TaurOs Project). Pajuna cow from the TaurOs Project in the Netherlands. Maronesa, a primitive and hardy breed from the North of Portugal, has remained aurochs-like in many respects.

It is also used by the TaurOs Project. The most primitive lineages of Maremmana, called "Maremmana primitivo", are used in the TaurOs Project. Limia Cattle bull and cow in the Netherlands (Tauros Project) Cachena cow from Portugal Edit By the 13th century AD, the aurochs’ range was restricted to Poland, Lithuania, Moldavia, Transylvania and East Prussia. The right to hunt large animals on any land was restricted first to nobles and then, gradually, to only the royal households. As the population of aurochs declined, hunting ceased, and the royal court used gamekeepers to provide open fields for grazing for the aurochs. The gamekeepers were exempted from local taxes in exchange for their service. Poaching aurochs was punishable by death. According to the royal survey in 1564, the gamekeepers knew of 38 animals. The last recorded live aurochs, a female, died in 1627 in the Jaktorów Forest, Poland, from natural causes. The causes of extinction were hunting, a narrowing of habitat due to the development of farming, and diseases transmitted by domestic cattle.

Gallery Aurochs Facts, Habitat, Pictures, Subspecies and Diet | Extinct Animals There are three recognized subspecies of Aurochs. The Eurasian aurochs (Bos primigenius primigenius) This subspecies was once found in the steppes of Central Asia, Europe and Siberia. They were an important part of the Eurasian megafauna, with whom they declined by the end of the Pleistocene period. The Eurasian specimens were domesticated into modern taurine cattle breeds in the Middle East and the Far East around sixth millennium BC. Hunting this species became a privilege for nobles and royal households. By the thirteenth century, this species existed in little numbers in the east Europe. They are also known to have migrated from Italy to Sicily via a land bridge. Later, when the bridge disappeared, the Aurochs found in Sicily evolved 20% smaller compared to its mainland relatives. The Indian aurochs (Bos primigenius namadicus) Researchers believe that the Indian subspecies was the first to appear on earth – around 2 million years ago. Fossil remains suggest that there were wild Aurochs apart from those domesticated ones – the zebu cattle.

Wild Aurochsâ fossil remains have been found from Karnataka, India. The North African aurochs (Bos primigenius africanus) They were found in the shrub-land and woodland of North Africa. It is believed that they descended from the Aurochs specimens found in the Middle East. Even though they were genetically distinct from their European counterparts, they were morphologically similar. The might have gone extinct before the Middle Ages. Depictions suggest that they had a saddle marking on their back. Habitat There is no unanimity when it comes to their habitat. Some researchers believe that their habitat can be compared to that of the African wild buffalo. However, some believe that they preferred grazing in the open grassland, along with other large herbivores. However, like domestic cattle, they inhabited wet areas. With the steadily growing human population, their range became fragmented. And, during the last century of its existence, they inhabited remote forests or marshes. Ecology and Behavior They are believed to have formed herd at least one time a year. Their mating season was late summer or early autumn. They also engaged in battles that often took a violent turn and led to death. They were swift and fast.

At times, the Aurochs could get very dangerous and aggressive when teased. Calves were born in spring. They used to stay with the mother till they become strong enough to keep up with the rest of the herd on their grazing grounds. Calves were vulnerable to predators like wolves, lions and tigers. Interesting Facts A Mitochondrial DNA research shows that all domesticated taurine cattle developed from around 80 wild female specimens in the Near East. Genetic studies have shown that Europe domestic cattle carry a Near Eastern origin. The European aurochs was neither domesticated, nor did they interbreed with the Near Eastern cattle. The “Turano-Mongolian” cattle now found in Mongolia, Korea, Japan and parts of China may interpret a fourth domestication event (third event among Bos taurus aurochs). Some believe that this group has deviated from the Near East group 30000 – 35000 years ago. Aurochs is often mistaken as wisent (the European bison) The last recorded Eurasian aurochs, a female specimen, died in 1627 in the JaktorÃ³w Forest, Poland from natural causes.

No great measures were taken to save this animal even when they were found in small numbers. Aurochs were found in great numbers in Europe during the Roman Empire. And, they were hugely popular as a battle beast in the Roman arenas. Scientists have thought of cloning this animal for a long time. Their goal was not just to bring back an animal that looks like Aurochs, but genetically as close as possible. Domestication Archaeological evidence suggests that domestication of this species took place in several regions of its native range, most importantly in the Indian subcontinent, between 10000â8000 years ago. It gave rise to two major domestic taxa found today â the humpless Bos taurus (taurine) and the humped Bos indicus (zebu). A third domestication event took place in Africa giving rise to Sanga cattle, a zebu-like cattle with no back hump. It is believed that they occurred from a cross between humped-zebus with taurine cattle breeds. There are evidences that these cattle were domesticated in Africa independently. The zebu and taurine bloodlines were brought in the past few hundred years.

Genetic evidence shows that Aaurochs was domesticated in India and also in northern parts of Africa. Museum Specimens Aurochs fossil specimens of can be found at the National Museum of Denmark, Natuurmuseum Groningen (Groningen, the Netherlands), the Zeeuws Museum (Middelburg, the Netherlands). Rosensteinmuseum in Stuttgart, Germany, holds an Aurochs skull. Published on July 20th 2015 by admin under Mammals . Article was last reviewed on 20th August 2015. Leave a Reply BBC Nature - Cattle and aurochs videos, news and facts Cattle and aurochs Cattle and aurochs Cattle as a species include not just the domestic cows with which we are familiar, but the aurochs which are the ancestor to all cattle, domestic and wild. The very last aurochs died in Poland in 1627. However, Chillingham wild cattle give a good idea of how these wild ancestors of our farm animals behaved.

These cattle can breed all year round, but most calves are produced in the spring or summer as poorer quality food in late autumn and winter delays the cows coming back into oestrus. The cows leave the herd to give birth, and the calves remain hidden for about a week before their mother introduces them to the herd. Scientific name: Bos primigenius Aurochs Facts for Kids | KidzSearch.com Aurochs skeleton in Denmark. Heck cattle look similar to the Aurochs The Aurochs, [1] or urus, (Bos primigenius) was a large species of cattle , once common in Europe but now extinct . [2] It was a wild animal, not a domesticated animal. The extinct aurochs/urus is a completely separate species from the wisent (the European bison ). [3] According to the Paleontologisk Museum, University of Oslo , aurochs developed in India some two million years ago, came into the Middle East and farther into Asia , and reached Europe about 250,000 years ago. [4] They were once thought a different species from modern European cattle (Bos taurus), but today not any more.

Modern cattle have become much smaller than their wild ancestors : the height of a large domesticated cow is about 1.5 meters (5 feet, 15 hands ), [5] while aurochs were about 1.75 meters (5.75 feet, 17 hands). Aurochs also had several features not often seen in modern cattle, such as lyre -shaped horns set at a forward angle, a pale stripe down the spine , and different color according to the gender. Males were black with a pale stripe down the spine, while females and calves were reddish (these colours are still found in a few domesticated cattle breeds, such as Jersey cattle). Aurochs were also known to have very aggressive behaviour, and killing one was seen as an act of courage in ancient cultures.

Contents 4 Other websites Subspecies At one time there were three aurochs subspecies, namely Bos primigenius namadicus (Falconer, 1859) that occurred in India, the Bos primigenius mauretanicus (Thomas, 1881) from North Africa and the Bos primigenius primigenius (Bojanus, 1827) from Europe and the Middle East. Only the European subspecies survived until recent times. Notes ↑ The word is both singular and plural. ↑ The animal's first scientific name, Bos primigenius, was meant as a Latin translation of the German term Auerochse or Urochs, which was they thought meant "primeval ox" or "proto-ox". Today, ITIS say this name is wrong. They classify aurochs under Bos taurus, the same species as domestic cattle. In 2003, the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature "conserved the usage of 17 specific names based on wild species, which are pre-dated by or contemporary with those based on domestic forms" ( ) confirming Bos primigenius for the Aurochs.

Taxonomists who consider domesticated cattle a subspecies of the wild Aurochs should use B. primigenius taurus; the name B. taurus remains available for domestic cattle where it is considered to be a separate species. ↑ The word Aurochs ( how to say: /ˈaʊrɒks/ or /ˈɔrɒks/) comes to English from German. The use in English of the plural form aurochsen is the same as the German plural and just like English ox (sg), oxen (pl). The word urus (/ˈjʊərəs/) comes to English from Latin, but came to Latin from Germanic origins. AHD4, headword urus. The words aurochs, urus, and wisent have all been used synonymously in English. AHD4, headwords aurochs, urus, wisent. MWU, headwords aurochs, urus, wisent. ↑ Height of Holstein cows References American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition (AHD4). Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Headwords aurochs, urus, wisent.

Bunzel-Drüke, M. 2001. Ecological substitutes for wild horse (Equus ferus Boddaert, 1785 = E. przewalslii Poljakov, 1881) and Aurochs (Bos primigenius Bojanus, 1827). Natur- und Kulturlandschaft, Höxter/Jena, 4, 10 p. AFKP. Online pdf (298 kB) International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature. 2003. Opinion 2027 (Case 3010). Usage of 17 specific names based on wild species which are pre-dated by or contemporary with those based on domestic animals (Lepidoptera, Osteichthyes, Mammalia): conserved. Bull.Zool.Nomencl., 60:81-84. Other websites Will Aurochs, a Cattle Species Found in Ancient Cave Paintings, be Resurrected?

| Ancient Origins 6 April, 2016 - 00:52 Natalia Klimczak Will Aurochs, a Cattle Species Found in Ancient Cave Paintings, be Resurrected? (Read the article on one page) A group of researchers is looking to resurrect aurochs, a species of wild cattle which disappeared in the first half of the 17th century. It's another attempt to bring this animal back to life - Nazi scientists once tried to accomplish the feat as well. According to the Washington Post , a group of scientists, historians, and ranchers are looking to resurrect the species of wild cattle that is related to the domesticated cattle seen today. The last auroch died in 1627 in Poland. The animal was tall and heavy, with long, long, forward-curving horns. It was a dangerous animal, even to the cave lion, the largest of its predators. The animal was admired by Julius Caesar, who described them in The Gallic Wars as being "a little below the elephant in size.'' The hunting horn made from the horn of the last aurochs bull that belonged to King Sigismund III of Poland.

( Public Domain ) Aurochs are often associated with a scene in a painting on a cavern wall at Lascaux , France from 17,000 years ago. The scene also depicted a Megaloceros. All of the animals which appear in a painting, including the giant deer, the cave lion, and the aurochs, are extinct. The Historic Grottoes of Folx-les-Caves: Ancient Hideout and Traveler Waypoint The Dutch nonprofit group named Stichting Taurus is providing financial support to the TaurOs Project , which is a partnership of ecologists, geneticists, historians, and cattle breeders. They are seeking to re-create the aurochs by crossbreeding modern cattle in a process known as back breeding. They say that laboratory-based genetic engineering is not required for the task. The process they've chosen instead is the selective breeding of animals that exist today to get as close as possible to their now-extinct ancestors. A painting by Heinrich Harder showing an aurochs fighting off a Eurasian wolf pack.

( Public Domain ) As Peter Maas wrote for the Sixth Extinction : "Back-breeding is possible because much of the genetic material of the extinct wild ancestors and subspecies survived in the domestic progeny or in surviving related subspecies. This can result in animals that resemble the original extinct ancestor or an extinct subspecies." The TaurOs Project was created as a part of a conservation movement which wants to “rewild” and restore large areas of land as much as possible to their pre-human state. Their goals include reintroducing key animals and plants that have disappeared. The project is led by Ronal Goderie, an ecologist and author of the book ''The Aurochs: Born to Be Wild'' . In 2008, they started their attempt at breeding the aurochs via their descendants which share characteristics with the lost species: large stature, long legs, a slender and athletic build, horns curving forward, and black coats. Restoration of the aurochs based on a bull skeleton from Lund and a cow skeleton from Cambridge, with characteristic external features of the aurochs.

( CC BY SA 3.0 ) In a talk with Washington Post Goderie said: “What you see already in the second generation is that the coloration of the animal is very aurochs-like. The bulls are black and have an eel stripe [along the spine]. They’re already higher on the legs. What’s more complicated is the size and shape of the horns. I would say that in some cases you can see an individual animal is 75 percent of where we need to get a…We think in six, seven generations we will get a stabilized group of Taurus cattle. That will take us another seven to 10 years.” A first generation cross bull from the TaurOs Project. ( CC BY SA 3.0 ) It's not the first time people have tried to bring back the aurochs . In the 1930s, Nazi commander Hermann Goering asked geneticists to recreate the extinct species. Heintz and Lutz Heck started to work on the possible re-creation of various animals including the aurochs. According to the notes left by Nazi scientists, they used a similar idea of developing a genetically engineered species by back-breeding from the aurochs’ descendants.

The Ishtar Gate and the Deities of Babylon In their attempt, they crossed Spanish fighting bulls with Highland cattle, along with primitive breeds from Corsica and Hungary. As a result, they received muscular cows with massive horns .The project of resurrecting the aurochs failed however, because both brothers died during World War II. The Heck bull was the product of their failed attempt, and is an animal with big horns, which measures about 1.4 meters (4.59 ft.) in height and weighs up to 600 kg (1322.77 lbs). Domestication of the Aurochs, Ancestors of Domestic Cattle (Circa 6,000 BCE) : HistoryofInformation.com Domestication of the Aurochs, Ancestors of Domestic Cattle (Circa 6,000 BCE) Bos primigenius (auroch). (Click on image to view larger.) Based on image in Van Vuure, C. (2005) Retracing the Aurochs: History Morphology and Ecology of an Extinct Wild Ox. Pensoft Publishers. Sofia-Moscow.

(Click on image to view larger.) Illustration from Sigismund von Herberstein's book published in 1556 captioned: "I am 'urus', tur in Polish, aurox in German (dunces call me bison) [lit. (the) ignorant (ones) had given me the name (of) Bison"; Latin original: Urus sum, polonis Tur, germanis Aurox: ignari Bisontis nomen dederant. (Click on image to view larger.) Mounted skeleton of a putative female auroch in the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen. (Click on image to view larger.) Domestication of the aurochs (urus, Bos primigenius), a type of large wild cattle which evolved in India about two million years ago, and migrated to Asia, and North Africa, reaching Europe about 250,000 years ago, is thought to have occurred in several parts of the world about 6000 BCE. "The aurochs was regarded as a challenging hunting quarry animal, contributing to its extinction.

The last recorded aurochs, a female, died in 1627 in the Jaktorów Forest , Poland, and her skull is now the property of the Livrustkammaren ("Royal Armory") museum in Stockholm, Sweden. "Representations and descriptions of aurochs appear in prehistoric cave paintings, in Julius Caesar's The Gallic War, and as the national symbol of many European countries, states and cities such as Alba-Iulia, Kaunas, Romania, Moldavia, Turka, Mecklenburg, and Uri. The Swiss canton Uri was named after this animal species" (Wikipedia article on Aurochs, accessed 12-25-2011). DNA traces cattle back to a small herd domesticated around 10,500 years ago DNA traces cattle back to a small herd domesticated around 10,500 years ago 27 March 2012 All cattle are descended from as few as 80 animals that were domesticated from wild ox in the Near East some 10,500 years ago, according to a new genetic study.

An international team of scientists from the CNRS and National Museum of Natural History in France, the University of Mainz in Germany, and UCL in the UK were able to conduct the study by first extracting DNA from the bones of domestic cattle excavated in Iranian archaeological sites. These sites date to not long after the invention of farming and are in the region where cattle were first domesticated. The team examined how small differences in the DNA sequences of those ancient cattle, as well as cattle living today, could have arisen given different population histories. Using computer simulations they found that the DNA differences could only have arisen if a small number of animals, approximately 80, were domesticated from wild ox (aurochs). The study is published in the current issue of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution. Dr Ruth Bollongino of CNRS, France, and the University of Mainz, Germany; lead author of the study, said: “Getting reliable DNA sequences from remains found in cold environments is routine. “That is why mammoths were one of the first extinct species to have their DNA read. But getting reliable DNA from bones found in hot regions is much more difficult because temperature is so critical for DNA survival.

This meant we had to be extremely careful that we did not end up reading contaminating DNA sequences from living, or only recently dead cattle.” The number of animals domesticated has important implications for the archaeological study of domestication. We know from archaeological remains that the wild ancestors of modern-day cattle, known as aurochs, were common throughout Asia and Europe, so there would have been plenty of opportunities to capture and domesticate them. Professor Mark Thomas Prof Mark Thomas, geneticist and an author of the study based at the UCL Research Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment: “This is a surprisingly small number of cattle. We know from archaeological remains that the wild ancestors of modern-day cattle, known as aurochs, were common throughout Asia and Europe, so there would have been plenty of opportunities to capture and domesticate them.” Prof Joachim Burger, an author of the study based at the University of Mainz, Germany, said: “Wild aurochs are very different beasts from modern domestic cattle. “They were much bigger than modern cattle, and wouldn’t have had the domestic traits we see today, such as docility.

So capturing these animals in the first place would not have been easy, and even if some people did manage snare them alive, their continued management and breeding would still have presented considerable challenges until they had been bred for smaller size and more docile behaviour.” Archaeological studies on the number and size of prehistoric animal bone have shown that not only cattle, but also goats, sheep and pigs were all first domesticated in the Near East. But saying how many animals were domesticated for any of those species is a much harder question to answer. Classical techniques in archaeology cannot give us the whole picture, but genetics can help - especially if some of the genetic data comes from early domestic animals. Dr Jean-Denis Vigne, a CNRS bio-archaeologist and author on the study, said: “In this study genetic analysis allowed us to answer questions that – until now –archaeologists would not even attempt to address. “A small number of cattle progenitors is consistent with the restricted area for which archaeologists have evidence for early cattle domestication ca. 10,500 years ago.

This restricted area could be explained by the fact that cattle breeding, contrary to, for example, goat herding, would have been very difficult for mobile societies, and that only some of them were actually sedentary at that time in the Near East.” Dr Marjan Mashkour, a CNRS Archaeologist working in the Middle East added “This study highlights how important it can be to consider archaeological remains from less well-studied regions, such as Iran. Without our Iranian data it would have been very difficult to draw our conclusions, even though they concern cattle at a global scale.” Image: Blond d'Aquitaine on a mountain pasture. Source: Wikimedia CABINET // Heavy Breeding Issue 45 Games Spring 2012 Heavy Breeding Michael Wang In 1920, the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck, directors of the Berlin and Munich zoos, respectively, began a two-decade breeding experiment. Working with domestic cattle sought out for their “primitive” characteristics, they attempted to recreate “in appearance and behavior” the living likeness of the animals’ extinct wild ancestor: the aurochs.

“Once found everywhere in Germany,” according to Lutz Heck, by the end of the Middle Ages the aurochs had largely succumbed to climate change, overhunting, and competition from domestic breeds.1 The last aurochs herds died out in the Polish-Lithuanian Union, where a documented population persisted under royal protection in Mazovia until the middle of the seventeenth century. Historical descriptions of these animals identified the aurochs as similar to domestic oxen, but entirely black, with a whitish stripe running down the back.2 More distant accounts emphasized their ferocity and imposing size. Julius Caesar described the aurochs of Germania as an elephantine creature prone to unprovoked attack.3 Image depicting the slaying of an aurochs, originally published in Conrad Gesner’s Historiae animalium, and seen here in a reproduction from 1560. The illustrator has shown the animal with the beard and horns of a European bison, most likely due to a lack of firsthand knowledge of either species. By the sixteenth century, both animals were little known outside of their limited range in Eastern Europe and Russia. Courtesy Photo Researchers.

For the scholarly world, the memory of the aurochs was preserved in a 1550s appendix to Conrad Gesner’s Historiae animalium. Intended to distinguish this nearly vanished animal from Europe’s other species of wild cattle, the European bison, the mention formally reinscribed the aurochs into the annals of zoological science. Over 350 years after its publication, this encyclopedia of animals both real and imagined (satyrs and sea monsters appear alongside hedgehogs and hippopotamuses) served, for the Heck brothers, as a key source on the extinct aurochs. This, along with a handful of artistic representations, formed the basis of the Heck brothers’ wild ideal. Their research cited copies of the lost “Augsburg Picture” (which is thought, today, to have represented a domestic bull), a 1730 Meissen porcelain group by Kändler depicting a pack of hounds encircling a wounded bull (whose piebald coloration should have similarly suggested a domesticated subject), and the prehistoric cave paintings at the Abrigo de los Toros in Spain.

The Hecks’ aurochs would be the culmination of an erratic trip through Western art history, from its primeval origins up to Baroque naturalism. Through a mimetic reversal, the breeding process sought to restore attributes known only through human cultural products. While the project took up widely held scientific theories of inheritance and conformed to the natural historical conception of the aurochs as the sole progenitor of domestic cattle (a view familiar at least since Georges Cuvier’s 1812 Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes), the Heck brothers’ biological means served primarily aesthetic ends. This conflation of biological and aesthetic destiny coincided with a strain of Nazi thought that sought to apply pseudo-Darwinian theories in support of a racialized conception of the state. In this mode, the zoologist Konrad Lorenz identified parallels between the changes he observed in animals as the result of their domestication and what he saw as the deleterious genetic effects of civilization.

Among the traits shared by domesticated animals and city dwellers were a supposed increase in phenotypic variation (novel coloration, for instance), neoteny (the retention of juvenile features, as in the short face of a Pekinese), atrophy of the muscles, and an increase in sexual activity and fertility. These traits were not only dangerous signs of degeneration; they were also aesthetically displeasing. In his 1940 article “Durch Domestikation verursachte Störungen arteigenen Verhaltens” (Domestication-induced disorders of species-typical behavior), Lorenz presented a series of images of Roman sculptures, comparing the “beautiful” (an Olympian) with the “ugly” (a satyr or, even, a bust of Socrates). These art-historical valuations were extended to wild animals and their domestic counterparts: wolves and dogs, boars and pigs, mouflon and sheep, jungle fowl and barnyard roosters. For Lorenz, the wild ancestor (the photographs of which were mostly acquired from Oskar Heinroth, Lutz Heck’s associate at the Berlin Zoo) were consistently deemed the more beautiful.

This aesthetic response, Lorenz theorized, was also an inborn survival strategy. Sketch by Konrad Lorenz comparing the morphology of wild and domesticated animals—humans included. From a letter to Oskar Heinroth, 18 January 1939. Beauty was, for Lorenz, the outward sign of a “biological unity.” Domestication, with its attendant increase in variation and “mutations,” was a process of decay. The evolutionary unity of the wild form deteriorates into aberrant types. For the Hecks, the idea of the aurochs was precisely that of a lost genetic unity—the fragments of which persisted, scattered among diverse domestic cattle breeds. Their task would be the re-stitching of these genetic fragments. Lutz Heck recounted: Much as a mosaic picture may be separated into its individual tesserae, the heritable constitution of a living being can be split up in the hereditary process and its elements passed on separately to descendents.

If we carry this theory to the case of domestic cattle as descendents of the wild aurochs, we see in them the heritable constitution of the aurochs so divided up that out of many races and breeds of cattle each one has only a part of the original heritable constitution of wild cattle. What my brother and I now had to do was to unite in a single breeding stock all those characteristics of the wild animal which are now found only separately in individual animals.4 In Lorenz’s conception, however, biological unity extended beyond the physical and behavioral attributes of the animal itself. Following on the work of the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll, Lorenz understood an organism as essentially linked to its environment. Together, organism and environment formed a “unified functional cycle,” a phenomenon that Lorenz observed exclusively in relation to wild animals.5 Just as Lorenz saw the effects of domestication as deleterious fragmentation (the modification of discrete traits), the original act of domestication was itself a kind of fragmentation. Domestication severed an organism from its natural place within an environmental whole.

Lutz Heck (far left) and Hermann Göring (not surprisingly, on the far right) examining a relief map of the Białowieża Forest. The tiny figures represent characteristic game animals (elk, red deer, etc.); in the background a stuffed European bison looms. The horn sitting on the map is perhaps from a Heck aurochs. Image from Waidwerk der Welt, a catalogue published to accompany the 1937 International Hunting Exposition in Berlin. According to this system, then, the recreation of the aurochs would be incomplete were this animal to be confined to the artificial sphere of a zoological garden. To restore the biological unity of the aurochs would require the restoration of its original environs. In the imagination of the Hecks and their research patron—Reichsjägermeister Hermann Göring—this environment was not in fact entirely lost to time. The ideal site for the introduction of the Heck aurochs would be the primeval forest of Białowieża, one of the last old-growth forests remaining in Europe. At the border of Poland and Belarus, the forest had been historically protected as the privileged hunting grounds of Polish kings and Russian tsars.

In a photograph from the International Hunting Exposition of 1937 in Berlin, Göring and Lutz Heck survey a relief map of Białowieża populated by tiny figurines of elk, bison, and deer.6 Resting atop the map is a curving horn, very much like the “sturdy white horns tipped with black” that Heck described, in a contemporary visitors’ guide to the Berlin zoo, as characteristic of the regenerated aurochs.7 If this is indeed a horn from a Heck bull, its exhibition anticipated the 1942 introduction of the regenerated aurochs to Białowieża—a region “so uniquely suited to this purpose”—during the period when, as Lutz Heck passively recalled less than a decade after the war, the forest had come for a few years “under German administration.”8 Following the German occupation of eastern Poland in 1941, Göring envisioned the transformation of Białowieża into a vast game reserve. The agenda dovetailed with the Hecks’ back-breeding programs.

One of the last European forests largely undisturbed since the Ice Age, Białowieża also sheltered rare game animals: bears, wolves, capercaillies, and the last of the lowland European bison, an animal which appears alongside the aurochs in Lutz Heck’s constellation of ancient German game. Heck recalled: In my youth my imagination was caught by the famous description in the Nibelungenlied of Siegfried’s hunt in the forest of the Vosges. … I was interested above all in the two huge wild oxen, which have become almost legendary but are regarded as the most powerful representatives of primeval German game—the European bison and the aurochs.9 Bison monument by Meissen sculptor Max Esser, 1934. Commissioned as a monument to the successful cross-breeding of European bison and Canadian wood bison, it was originally installed on Göring’s Carinhall estate in the Schorfheide Forest. The sculpture was broken into pieces after the war and buried. Unearthed in 1990, it is now installed in the nearby town of Eichhorst.

The reintroduction of these two animals into the German landscape was part of a larger project of constructing a national identity based on mythic foundations. Germany under the Third Reich would be restored to the Germany of the Nibelungenlied. Göring, a modern Siegfried, would revive the ancient hunting campaigns for increasingly rare—or reconstructed—species. To realize this historical fantasy, however, required a series of spatial and temporal displacements. While Göring traveled east to Białowieża to seek Germany’s lost game, the Hecks arranged for the export of Białowieża’s bison west to Schorfheide, Göring’s reserve north of Berlin. There, they were integrated into ongoing efforts to cross European bison with Canadian wood bison in an attempt to strengthen the diminished European genetic stock. Subsequent breeding would then restore a more European phenotype, while carrying over the “robustness” of the American. The primary goal was increased fertility, which was necessary to populate Göring’s hunting grounds. The Nibelungenlied passage that Heck cites reappeared at the base of a monument—a charging bison in Meissen stoneware—erected to commemorate the success of the breeding program at Schorfheide.

The inscription on the back of the sculpture, addressed to a future when Göring’s estate would have vanished from memory, eulogized the park as an “asylum” for bison, elk, deer, and (reconstructed) aurochs. These animals themselves would provide “living testimony” to a lost age when Germany was “not yet ruled by Man.” In Białowieża, this dream of a wilderness untouched by human hands helped justify the murderous campaigns carried out under the banner of Germanization. To prepare the area for German settlement, the forest would be cleared of its non-Aryan occupants. Under Göring’s directives, mass deportations and executions targeted Białowieża’s Jewish inhabitants, Polish resistance fighters, and Soviet partisans. These campaigns of death were, however paradoxically, intimately tied to a particular nationalistic conception of life: the pursuit of “living space” (Lebensraum). Lebensraum mixed political, military, and economic objectives with the language and concepts of the life sciences.

In Białowieża, the appropriation of land and natural resources for German use would assume the scientific guise of “forest management.” The Polish biologist Tadeusz Vetulani described this dual program—of human extermination and animal propagation—as the German “management” of Białowieża: This “management,” which, during World War I, was marked by over-felling of trees and over-exploitation of wildlife—bison, elk and deer in particular—during World War II brought further, and even more gruesome and elaborate, exploitation not only of our natural resources and material goods but also of our blood—in the most literal sense—and religious heritage.10 Like the Hecks, Vetulani had dedicated himself to the restoration of extinct European mammals. His work revolved around the Konik ponies, a Polish breed that traced its bloodline to Białowieża’s last wild tarpans—ancestor of the domestic horse. Vetulani had reintroduced selectively bred Koniks to Białowieża. His research, however, aligned with that of the Hecks too well. During the war, the Hecks rounded up these horses to supply their own tarpan breeding programs in Munich and Berlin.

Vetulani’s anguish over the “exploitation” of Polish blood here takes on another literal meaning: even as German forces shot down partisans in Białowieża’s swamps, the Hecks drained Białowieża of its unique mammals, prized for the purity of their “primitive” blood. As with the bison program, the breeding of the Heck horse relied on this transfusion from east to west. What the Hecks saw as the restoration of an ancient unity—the reconstruction of a lost “Germanic” species—was, for Vetulani, a “baffling” campaign of destruction. Bred from animals with eighteenth-century roots in the Białowieża forest, the Konik pony breeding program was, as Vetulani recounted, “meant to bring back to Białowieża her primeval inhabitant.” Lutz Heck’s decision to “uproot” the Koniks from Białowieża “thus brutally stopped the breeding experiment.”11 The Hecks’ back-breeding projects themselves would continue only a short while longer. When the Allied bombs rained down on Berlin for two nights in January 1944, what remained of the battered zoological gardens went up in flames.

Animals succumbed to shrapnel wounds or burned to death in their cages. Dangerous species broke loose and were shot. Such was the fate of the Heck aurochs. Lutz Heck’s son gunned down the agitated and stampeding aurochs, together with warthogs and wild boar, after they had escaped their burning enclosures. Ten months later, following the war, when the director of the Białowieża forest, Jan Jerzy Karpiński, was able to return safely to Poland, he was met with rumors of strange animals left behind by the retreating Germans. In a letter to the State Council for Nature Conservation, Karpiński reported: At the end of October 1944, when I took charge of the Białowieża National Park again, I was informed that of the buffaloes let out by the Germans, 8 to 12 still remain in the forest. I was perfectly aware, of course, that these were not real buffaloes, but most probably regenerated aurochs from the Romincka Forest (which was later officially corroborated).12 As the Hecks had envisioned, their regenerated aurochs persisted in a semi-wild state in the Białowieża forest.

When Lutz Heck heard that some of the animals had survived the war, he proudly cited this fact as evidence of their suitability to the natural environs. To the Polish forestry service, however, the stray cattle were profoundly unnatural: they had no place in the forest as it had been known for hundreds of years. At Karpiński’s request, a provisional corral was built with the intention of capturing the Heck animals, which, forestry officials correctly assumed, would not survive on their own. The post–World War II revision of Poland’s borders hindered this task. Białowieża forest had been carved in two, with the eastern side under Soviet jurisdiction. By crossing the border into Belarus for increasingly long periods, the Heck aurochs evaded the Polish foresters, and most likely soon perished. “It seems that nothing can be done at this point,” Karpiński lamented, “to save the remaining animals from extinction.”13 The Heck aurochs did not altogether disappear. At the Munich zoo, Heinz Heck’s aurochs survived the war unharmed. Heck cattle—as the breed is known today—trace their lineage to these animals.

There have even been recent attempts, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, to introduce the breed into state nature reserves as surrogates for the megafauna that once grazed on lowland grasses. But the Heck fantasy of the aurochs no longer clings to these animals, despite their atavistic features, and the aurochs itself, Bos primigenius, has lost much of its unique scientific status. Current nomenclature no longer distinguishes the aurochs as a species distinct from domestic cattle. The realization of the Hecks’ wild ideal proved unsustainable. Their vision of biological reunification continually sought to expand its borders: from the regeneration of a single animal to the violent reshaping of an entire landscape. No curve of a horn, or shade of an eel-striped coat could satisfy this totalizing vision. Ultimately, the Hecks’ biological methods were inadequate to their task—for the aurochs was not a species, but a symbol. Lutz Heck, Wegweiser durch den Zoologischen Garten Berlin (Berlin: Aktien-verein des Zoologischen Gartens zu Berlin, 1941), p. 53. My translation.

Sigmund Freiherr von Herberstein, Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1556). Julius Caesar, The Gallic War, trans. Carolyn Hammond (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1996), bk. 6, sec. 28. Lutz Heck, Animals: My Adventure, trans. E. W. Dickes (London: Methuen, 1954), p. 143. Konrad Lorenz, “Durch Domestikation verursachte Störungen arteigenen Verhaltens,” Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie und Charakterkunde, no. 59 (1940). The photograph appears in Waidwerk der Welt: Erinnerungswerk an die internationale Jagdausstellung Berlin 1937, 2.–28. November (Berlin: Paul Parey, 1938). Lutz Heck, Wegweiser, op. cit., p. 53. Lutz Heck, Animals: My Adventure, op. cit., p. 154. Ibid., p. 139.

Tadeusz Vetulani, “Co słychać w Puszczy Białowieskiej?,” Ziemia, no. 5 (1946), p. 4. Translation by Mikołaj Szajna. Ibid., p. 7. Jan Jerzy Karpiński, letter to State Council for Nature Conservation, 4 May 1946, the State Archive in Białystok, Poland. Translation by Mikołaj Szajna. Ibid. Michael Wang is an artist and writer based in New York City. His solo show “Carbon Copies” was exhibited at Foxy Production in January 2012. He is currently writing a book with Peter Eisenman on architecture under late capitalism. Cabinet is published by Immaterial Incorporated, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. Cabinet receives generous support from the Lambent Foundation, the Orphiflamme Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Opaline Fund, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Danielson Foundation, the Katchadourian Family Foundation, The Edward C. Wilson and Hesu Coue Wilson Family Fund, and many individuals.

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Question: The aurochs is a wild ancestor of which domesticated animal?
Answer: Cattle