Aurochs Profile
During the ice age, before humans lowered the bar for everyone, mammals hit their peak. There were straight-tusked elephants two storeys high, sloths that could pull over trees, and cats with eight-inch fangs.
There were also cows, but in classic prehistoric fashion, they were enormous. Almost two meters tall at the shoulder, with a horn span of around three meters across. These were the Aurochs: the ancestors of all modern cattle.
Aurochs Facts Overview
| Habitat: | Grasslands and Marsh |
| Location: | Worldwide |
| Lifespan: | Unknown |
| Size: | 1.8m (6 feet) at the shoulder |
| Weight: | Up to 1000kg |
| Colour: | Males were black, females dark brown |
| Diet: | Grasses and forbs |
| Predators: | Humans |
| Top Speed: | Not recorded |
| No. of Species: | 1 |
| Conservation Status: | Extinct |
Aurochs is both singular and plural, so you can have one Aurochs and two Aurochs, and as many Aurochs as you can carry. Sadly there isn’t a single Aurochs left, as they were driven to extinction by humans, who shared their entire evolutionary history with these exceptional bovids all the way up to the 15th century.
Today, they’re remembered for their size, power, and agility in historical artefacts, and by modern geneticists, who hope to one day figure out a way to bring them back.
Interesting Aurochs Facts
1. They’re one of the earliest animals recorded
Cave paintings were one of the ways early humans made sense of the world and communicated information to one another. As nomadic hunter-gatherers, a record on a cave wall could come in handy as a way to identify the available resources and plan a hunt.
The Aurochs show up on the walls of caves in drawings dating as far back as 17,000 years ago, and stone engravings of Aurochs have been dated back as far as 38,000 years!
These latter depictions were thought to represent more than a simple record of their presence, and some Anthropologists believe they’re a testament to the sheer size and glory of one of the largest herbivores on Earth. 1
2. The clues are in the teeth!
Animal bones can give a lot of information to those who know how to look, but the teeth are often the most useful part of ancient remains. From the molars and premolars of an animal (not the canines) we can establish its age, what it evolved to eat, and how much energy it obtained in the process.
From these teeth, it’s even possible to extrapolate an image of the animal’s habitat, and ancient Aurochs teeth show us that around ten thousand years ago, their habitat changed from grazing on vast plains to browsing in a more mixed environment.
Around this time, hunting of the animal became less common, and domestication of the Aurochs began, and this appears to have happened all over the world from India to England.
The lineage is understandably a bit hazy, but it’s thought that Aurochs hybridised with already-domesticated cattle and that modern cows, Bos taurus all over the world descended from around 80 Aurochs around 10,500 years ago.
But these weren’t simply ancient members of the Pleistocene megafauna, they lived alongside humans until surprisingly recently. 2
3. They made it to 1627
One of the longest-lasting of the Ice Age megafauna, these huge cows survived as recently as the 17th century, with the last known wild population dying out in a Polish marshland habitat.
Their extinction came, as it still promises to for so many extant species, as a result of habitat destruction; logging and clearing for human agriculture reduced their numbers exponentially as humans developed, and by 1627, the last of the species, a female, died.
While they were alive, though, they were popular with humans throughout history. 3
4. They made good battle beasts
The Romans had a habit of wiping out glorious animals by selecting them for high-profile events, in which they’d pit them against one another, or against some unfortunate slave or prisoner.
They did a good job of reducing lion and elephant populations in North Africa to the point where they were quickly wiped out entirely by the subsequent Arab empire, and they did a number on the poor Aurochs, too.
Julius Caesar himself commended the strength and speed of the Aurochs, and they wouldn’t just be put to fight one another. One of the gruesome spectacles of execution in Ancient Rome was called Damnatio ad Bestias, or ‘execution by beast’.
It’s commonly thought that lions, tigers, bears and aurochs were some of the unwitting executioners of this practice due to their formidable strength and power, but this wasn’t the only way the animal’s grandeur was celebrated. 4
5. They had impressive horns
The huge horns atop the Aurochs could reach almost a meter long and would be roughly 20cm in diameter, making them fantastic symbols of power and useful tools for various means.
These would have been used by the Romans as hunting horns, and in Europe, as drinking vessels. Being much rarer during the Viking age, Aurochs horn would have been highly prized over that of domestic cattle, and significantly bigger.
Horns from an Aurochs have been found with elaborate decorations and adornments, showing a significant level of admiration and status associated with them. 5
6. The Minoans might have jumped over them
In a spectacular display of bravery and acrobatics, various ancient Mediterranean civilisations would demonstrate their authority over a bull without needing to run around stabbing it with spears from horses first – as they still do in Spain.
The bull, understandably wound up from being in captivity and surrounded by screaming Greeks, Minoans, and Hittites, would rampage toward the smaller mammal, at which point, the latter would leap over the animal, possibly doing some kind of somersault and landing gracefully on the other side of it.
This bull, in many cases, is depicted with the size and proportions of an Aurochs, and was likely either the native species or a hybrid or domesticated version.
Grotesquely, many modern bullfighting equivalents involve much smaller, fatter bulls and lots of stabbing holes in them first to weaken them even further.
In contrast to these cowardly and barbaric modern displays, ancient bull leaping would have involved an agile, powerful, and slender monster, making the act genuinely impressive. 6
7. They were a keystone species
As such athletic and colossal herbivores, the Aurochs would have played one of the most significant roles in their ecosystems.
Nutrient recycling, seed dispersal, and forest management would have come under their roles and responsibilities, and their loss at the hands of human hunters and farmers is a loss to the global biodiversity as a result.
This is why a lot of conservationists are interested in de-extincting them, something which might not be as ridiculous as it sounds.
8. We’ve got a couple of options if we want to bring them back
Modern cattle are a diverse-looking bunch that vary in shape and size depending on how they’ve been selectively bred over the millennia. But they’re all more or less the same species.
The good thing about selective breeding is that it mostly involved switching genes on and off, and for the most part, those genes are still there, very much intact, and can (in theory) be re-activated over time using the same process.
Having been bred from Aurochs, modern cattle present with 90% wild Auroch DNA and should still have the rest of that information somewhere inside them. Some researchers believe we could “back-breed cattle until we get an Aurochs again, for reintroduction into its old habitat (if there’s any left).
Another approach would be more or less the same thing, only done in the lab at the microscopic level with gene editing, or cloning of Auroch DNA. Since the wild species died out so recently, high-quality DNA should be available to work with, but this process is harder to get funding for and much more expensive.
Still, with a deeper understanding of the necessity for large animals in our ecosystems, there’s a chance that science can bring some of them back, hopefully contributing to a more harmonious existence and one in which the climate and our ecosystems are buffered by enriched biodiversity. 7
Aurochs Fact-File Summary
Scientific Classification
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Artiodactyla |
| Family: | Bovidae |
| Genus: | Bos |
| Species: | primigenius |
Fact Sources & References
- Barbara J. King (2017), “Prehistoric Aurochs Image Opens Up A New View Of Human Evolution”, NPR.
- Anders Götherström (2005), “Cattle domestication in the Near East was followed by hybridization with aurochs bulls in Europe”, PUB Med Central.
- Anders Götherström (2005), “Cattle domestication in the Near East was followed by hybridization with aurochs bulls in Europe”, National Library of Medicine.
- Syed Adil (2017), “Colosseum Craziness”, Medium.
- Maiken Hemme Bro-Jørgensen (2018), “Ancient DNA analysis of Scandinavian medieval drinking horns and the horn of the last aurochs bull”, Science Direct.
- Jeremy McInerney (Year), “BULLS AND BULL-LEAPING IN THE MINOAN WORLD”, Penn Museum.
- Peter Williamson (2015), “Ancient Aurochs Genome Contains the DNA Blueprint for Modern Cattle”, International Milk Genomics Consortium.