Aurochs

How a wild animal became a domestic animal

The aurochs or ur is considered the first wild cattle domesticated by humans, to guarantee a steady supply of meat and milk and to have draft and working animals available. Domestication is always associated with physical changes as well: over time, the animals become smaller, the horns more curved, the legs and skull shorter, and the trunk becomes long and massive. Breeding is geared toward producing especially productive animals. Our modern domestic cattle arose from the domestication of the Eurasian aurochs that began around 8,000 years ago; its wild form went extinct in 1627.

Three subspecies of the aurochs are distinguished: the Eurasian or European aurochs (Bos primigenius primigenius), the Indian aurochs (Bos primigenius namadicus) and the African aurochs (Bos primigenius africanus or B. p. mauretanicus). The Indian aurochs went extinct in the wild at least 4,400 years ago and its domestication began about 9,000 years ago; today’s zebus (Bos indicus) are domesticated Indian aurochs. The African aurochs went extinct at least 3,000 years ago. Only the Eurasian aurochs survived as a wild form into historical times.

Aurochs – Fact sheet

alternative names	Urus, Ure, Eurasian Aurochs, European aurochs, Auerochs
scientific names	Bos primigenius primigenius, Bos primigenius, Bos taurus primigenius, Bos primigenius italics, Bos primigenius siciliae, Bovinichnus uripeda
original range	Europe, Middle East, Central Asia (subspecies also in North Africa and India)
year of extinction	1627
causes of extinction	habitat loss, hunting
IUCN status	extinct

The aurochs as part of culture

The oldest aurochs remains ever found are around 700,000 years old and were discovered in Tunisia. The oldest evidence from Europe is 600,000 years old. The oldest cultural records of the ur in Europe are considered to be cave paintings in France, for example in the Lascaux  cave and in the Chauvet Cave. The paintings show the ur together with other Ice Age wild animals. The wild cattle have always been regarded as important game for humans. Prehistorians assume that the paintings in the Lascaux Cave date from around 36,000 to 19,000 BC; those in the Chauvet Cave may be even older.

In antiquity, aurochs were captured by the Romans for animal hunts in amphitheatres—alongside gladiator fights, animal hunts were the main attractions at the time. The Romans also used the aurochs’ horns as hunting horns, and whoever killed an ur received great honour.

Not only the aurochs was part of animal hunts in the Roman Empire. Other animals that are extinct today also served as entertainment, for example the Caspian tiger (Panthera tigris virgata), the African leopard (Panthera pardus pardus), the Atlas bear or the Barbary lion.

The rarer the urs became, the more hunting the wild cattle became a privilege of the nobility. The horns of the wild cattle were richly decorated or set in gold and used as drinking horns and status symbols.

Nobles hunted urs with hunting dogs, bow and arrow, and nets. The animals were attributed magical powers. Among other things, cross-shaped heart bones contributed to this mystification—bones that were visible when a wild bovine was slaughtered and its heart removed. Adult domestic cattle also have two cross-shaped heart bones (Ossa cordis).

Morphology of the aurochs: relics from the megafauna

What a wild ur must once have looked like could be reconstructed by science with the help of numerous fossil finds, historical descriptions, and cave paintings or later contemporary depictions.

In Europe, the aurochs was one of the largest herbivores after the Ice Age, although there were regional size differences: in Denmark and northern Germany, the shoulder height of bulls in the Holocene was 155 to 180 centimetres, that of cows 135 to 155 centimetres; in Poland, the bulls had a shoulder height of 170 to 185 centimetres, while for cows it was 165 centimetres; in Hungary, the shoulder height of bulls was only 155 to 160 centimetres. Shoulder heights of two metres are known for the ur only from the Pleistocene.

The weight of the wild cattle was probably comparable to that of today’s European bison (Bos bonasus) and banteng (Bos javanicus) and was between 700 and 1,000 kilograms. The Indian aurochs had larger horns but was overall somewhat smaller. Aurochs cows were smaller than aurochs bulls, but both had horns, with the bulls having larger and more curved horns. The horns could reach lengths of 80 to 140 centimetres; the diameter was ten to 20 centimetres.

Aurochs cows were reddish-brown and the bulls were black. The males also had a light dorsal stripe along the back and a white-rimmed muzzle, similar to the banteng.

Compared to their domesticated form, urs had long and slender legs, so that their shoulder height roughly corresponded to their trunk length. Because of the large horns, their skull was much larger and longer than that of domestic cattle. Bulls in particular had strongly developed neck and shoulder musculature, which gave them the so-called shoulder hump. This can still be found today in the Spanish fighting bull, which is bred for bullfighting.

The aurochs avoided human settlements

Where people settled, the ur disappeared. The ur has always avoided proximity to humans. High settlement density, the construction of towns and settlements, the associated changes to the landscape, introduced grazing livestock and hunting made the aurochs a retreating species.

As the population grew, the population numbers of urs declined. In North Africa and the Near East, urs disappeared as early as antiquity; in Bavaria, the last aurochs was shot in 1470 in the Neuburg Forest. By the 15th century at the latest, the ur had been eradicated in Central Europe.

The last aurochs hid in the primeval forests of less densely populated eastern Europe, in Poland, East Prussia and Lithuania. Not only urs, but other large European ungulates also sought refuge there: moose, European bison and wild horses.

The forest of Jaktorów, about 55 kilometres southwest of Warsaw, served as the last refuge of the urs—protected and cared for by the Dukes of Masovia. They placed the wild cattle under protection and ensured that they were fed in winter.

Otto Antonius, the former director of the Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna, evaluated the records from this period: in 1564 there were eleven bulls, 22 cows and five calves; in 1599 there were a total of 24 urs, in 1602 only four. From 1620, only a single cow remained, which finally died in 1627.

Why the aurochs went extinct

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) explains the rapid disappearance of the last remaining urs in Jaktorów by the change of ownership. Initially they belonged to the nobility and were protected and cared for, but later they passed into royal ownership.

King Sigismund I and his successor Sigismund Augustus apparently had less interest in aurochs than the previous owners. They did little to protect the wild cattle. Because the ur’s habitat was very limited at the end, not all animals could find enough food in winter and starved. It is also said that some bulls killed each other in fights, and very aggressive bulls were shot so that the meat could be given to the king.

After political unrest starting in 1572, a royal decree was issued only in 1604, stating that everything had to be done to protect the aurochs. At that point, however, there were hardly any aurochs left, so the decree could no longer have any effect.

The growing population, deforestation and the construction of settlements gradually displaced the ur from its habitat. In addition, domesticated cattle competed with the wild cattle for grazing areas. Livestock diseases and hunting also contributed to the disappearance of the species.

According to Cis van Vuure in Retracing The Aurochs (2005), historical records suggest that a second population probably survived beyond 1600. The animals are said to have lived in the Zamoyski game park in Poland. Igor Akimuschkin also notes in Threatened with extinction? (1972) a claim by the zoologist Max Hilzheimer, according to which an aurochs is said to have lived in Kaliningrad, Russia until 1669.

Evolution: the genomic natural history of the aurochs

For a study published in October 2024, The Genomic Natural History of the Aurochs, Conor Rossi, Mikkel-Holger S. Sinding and other geneticists at Trinity College Dublin examined up to 50,000-year-old DNA from 38 aurochs bones from Eurasia. This analysis showed that there was not just a single uniform aurochs lineage in Europe, but three distinct populations: western European, Italian and Balkan urs. The genetic diversity of the wild cattle was thus significantly greater than previously assumed.

The fossils of aurochs found in Europe are around 650,000 years old—dating back to the time when the first human ancestors appeared in Europe. However, the genetic analyses show that the aurochs in the easternmost and westernmost regions of Eurasia share a common ancestry that emerged only about 100,000 years ago. This indicates that a group of aurochs migrated out of South Asia and partially replaced the original populations.

The results of the study also highlighted how climate change and migrations influenced genetic development. At the beginning of the last Ice Age, about 100,000 years ago, the populations in Europe and northern Asia split genetically, only to mix again when it became warmer at the end of the Ice Age. During this time, populations shrank considerably, especially in Europe. Many animals retreated into southern refugia, which reduced their genetic diversity. After the Ice Age, these populations were able to recolonise Europe.

The greatest decline in genetic diversity occurred, however, when the urs were domesticated in Southwest Asia about 10,000 years ago to produce the first cattle. Only a few maternal lineages survived in the cattle gene pool (detectable through mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on from the mother).

Domestication began with a small group of animals, and as domesticated cattle spread with their herders across different regions, genetic mixing with wild aurochs occurred. Especially through matings with wild bulls, early cattle gained additional genetic diversity. This admixture meant that genetic traces of the four original aurochs lineages are still present in today’s domestic cattle.

Breeding a look-alike: creating an aurochs-like animal

The idea that domestic cattle released into the wild would once again become animals similar to the wild form was proposed by the Polish zoologist Feliks Pawel Jarocki in 1835. Using domestic cattle and their partly still present wild traits, the aim was to create an animal corresponding to the aurochs.

All taurine and zebuine domestic cattle descend from the ur, and numerous breeds have emerged that have adopted different traits of the original aurochs—be it similar proportions, coat colour, horns, robustness, or the ability to survive year-round in the wild without human intervention.

The biologist brothers Heinz and Lutz Heck wanted to bring together the original traits of the ur, which are distributed across different domestic cattle breeds, through crossbreeding and selection. Heinz Heck began his breeding-back program in the 1920s. For this he used Scottish Highland cattle, steppe cattle, Corsican cattle, as well as dairy cattle such as Brown Swiss and Murnau-Werdenfels.

The breeding result is Heck cattle, which indeed have horns and coat colours similar to the ur. That is already all they have in common, however: compared to the aurochs, Heck cattle are much smaller, have shorter legs, a stocky body build, a short skull, and sometimes colour and horn variants that differ from the ur.

There are various projects in which Heck cattle and other cattle are crossbred to produce look-alike breeds. The further breeding lines of Heck cattle are referred to as Taurus cattle. Taurus cattle resemble the aurochs quite strongly and have at least a shoulder height of 165 centimetres.

One of the youngest projects in Germany, Auerrind, has been active since 2015 and does not use Heck cattle for breeding, but instead five other breeds that are visually, genetically or behaviourally similar to the ur: Chianina, Maremmana, Sayaguesa, Hungarian steppe cattle and Watussi. The aim of the project is to achieve a high degree of homogeneity in the crossbred animals within ten to 20 years.

There are also plans in Great Britain to reintroduce the aurochs through the Northwoods Rewilding Network in Scotland. The aim of the project is to bring wild cattle back to the Scottish hills to promote natural biodiversity and revitalise landscape structure.