Original
Article About Dexters
"The
Dexter in History: Part One
From Aurochs to Ox: The Origins of
Domestic Cattle"
by Beverley McCulloch and Michael Trotter
A revised version of an article first published in
the Dexter Dispatch, Bulletin of the NZ Dexter Cattle Society, no.
30, November 2000, pages 12-14
To begin this series, the authors thought it would be of interest to
readers if they first reviewed the origin of domestic cattle in Europe,
which is particularly relevant to the historic evolution of the Dexter.
Most researchers now agree that all the cattle breeds common today
throughout the western world belong to a single species, Bos taurus,
which in turn evolved from a single wild species, the Aurochs, Bos
primigenius. This scientific name means simply ‘the first race of oxen’.
Today we tend to use the word ‘ox’ to describe a castrated male animal, but
in its original usage it was the common general term for all cattle – male
and female alike. (Both the words ‘ox’ and ‘Aurochs’ - pronounced ‘or-ox’ -
derive from the old Germanic term ‘urohso’ closely akin to the Latin ‘taurus’,
meaning bull.)
The
Aurochs bull was a huge beast with large horns, standing up to two
metres tall at the shoulder (that’s at least twice the height of a Dexter).
The species was found originally throughout much
of the northern hemisphere, except for North
 America, from at least 30,000
years ago. There was a great difference in size between Aurochs bulls and
cows, and archaeologists who studied their remains at first thought they
were dealing with two different species. Quite a lot is known about the
appearance of these ancestral cattle, and not only from their bones. Ten to
twenty thousand years ago prehistoric hunters drew numerous pictures of the
Aurochs on the walls of caves – some of them in natural colour (on the left
is a Paleolithic European cave painting of an Aurochs). Julius Caesar
described the Aurochs in his writings 1,000 years ago, and they survived in
central Europe until the 1600s.
The illustration to the right shows a sixteenth century woodcut of an
Aurochs made shortly before their extinction. The
ultimate extinction of this first cattle species was as a direct result of
hunting by humans, and the clearing of its woodland habitat for agriculture.
Long before this finally happened, however, somewhere around 6,000 years ago
in Neolithic times, humans had succeeded in domesticating a line of cattle
descended directly from the Aurochs. These had evolved to become the same
species as the domestic cattle of today, Bos taurus, although they
were smaller than most modern breeds.
When the bones and skulls of these 6,000 year old ‘modern’ cattle were first
discovered in peat bogs and on archaeological sites (including a number of
places in Ireland) researchers first gave them different scientific names
like Bos longifrons (the ox with the long narrow forehead, below
left) and Bos brachyceros (the short-horned ox, below right).
 
These were relative terms describing differences between these animals and
the original Aurochs. But the most interesting thing about these cattle was
that they were very small, smaller than most of today’s cattle. Eventually
scientists recognized that longifrons and brachyceros were not
separate species but just smaller and earlier representatives of modern
cattle. These two early first names were done away with.
Today it is also known that a significant reduction in size is one of the
signs of early domestication. The reasons for this may have been because of
poor husbandry, or reduction in the breeding gene pool of captive animals,
or simply because Neolithic humans deliberately selected smaller sized
animals to domesticate and breed from. After all, who really wants to
confine a two-metres high bull, with metre-long horns, on a permanent basis!
But the other thing that the scientists noted – and this is what is so
interesting for Dexter breeders – is that these earliest domestic cattle
were markedly similar to the British Celtic cattle, especially those of
Ireland, which survived in almost their original form in southwest Ireland
until relatively modern times. These were the cattle that formed the genesis
of today’s Kerry and Dexter breeds.
Of course, during the last five thousand years humans all over Europe and
Britain also continued to develop new larger and ‘improved’ strains of
domestic cattle which eventually replaced the small Celtic type in almost
every area – including much of Ireland.
But we can say, that of all modern Bos taurus breeds, the Dexter and
Kerry have the best recognized claim to a traceable 6,000-year lineage back
to the origins of domestication and the original prehistoric Aurochs.
Head of a modern Dexter
cow (left) with prehistoric drawing of Aurochs (right)
On to Part Two
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