The Intimate Bond by Brian Fagan Page A

of an aurochsmight well have triggered no emotional reaction from a grazing wild ox whatsoever. I’ve walked quietly among herds of antelope with no obvious threatening intent. They merely looked up, and then went on grazing. But if I’d suddenly appeared from among the trees or high grass, they would have bolted at once, feeling threatened. This is very different behavior from that of a beast that is aware it’s being stalked and then attacked. And this may be a clue as to how cattle were first tamed.
    Hunters survive and are successful in the hunt because they know their quarry at close quarters, at every season, at night and by day, at first light and dusk. They’ve learned when not to approach them, and how to allay their fears; they’ve watched how wild oxen protect their young. One can imagine a hunting group living in close juxtaposition to a small aurochs herd, even walking around them in the open with no plan for a kill. Perhaps a young calf or a juvenile bull became separated from the herd. The hunters, who probably knew different beasts individually, would gently herd the stray into a large enclosure, and then make sure it had fodder and water. And so the slow process would unfold until a few captive animals became habituated to humans and bred within their corral, or grazed nearby and were corralled at night. The hunters, now herders, would protect their charges against predators. The process must have taken years before the lumbering animals became accustomed to captivity and management, or to being milked. Regular milking must have developed a close bond between tamer and tamed, which may account for the intimate relationships that subsequently developed between cattle and their owners in many pastoral societies.
    Exploitation, breeding, and nurturing—these practices resonate in modern experience with animal husbandry, which began during the eighteenth century (see chapter 15). Early cattle herders were concerned above all with acquiring docile beasts that were easily managed. They must have soon learned that castrating surplus males produced more manageable beasts. This also allowed a herder to choose which animals to breed. Within a relatively short time, domesticated cattle were smaller, almost juvenile (a condition known as neoteny), more docile, and less wary around humans.
    Wild cattle may have been dangerous prey, but they offered important advantages to those who tamed them. Nutritionally, they are highly desirable, supplying 2,360 calories per kilogram. Almost certainly they were tamed initially not for their milk, but for their meat. As societies in Southwest Asia turned to cultivation, their predominantly carbohydrate-laden diet created both long-term health problems such as osteoporosis, and needs for protein to compensate for cereal-based diets. In the final analysis, it was easier to protect, breed, and cull herds than to hunt reliably—and we humans develop attachments to large mammals and their young. Domestication was a symbiotic process to which both animals and humans contributed.
    Domesticating
Bos
    Now let’s look at the archaeological data. Most authorities believe that
Bos primigenius
was domesticated at least twice, perhaps three times. The Cro-Magnons of Europe never tamed
Primigenius
, which was first tamed in more arid, less-forested environments. There, perhaps, the beasts were easier to approach when they could see people clearly. Humpless cattle, sometimes called taurines (
Bos taurus
), were first corralled in the Taurus Mountains region of what is now Turkey, the place where the greatest genetic diversity of cattle occurs. If the molecular biologists are to be believed, cattle domestication may have involved a mere eighty beasts. 3 Mitochondrial DNA from ancient and modern sources tell us that only a limited number of cattle lineages was involved in a domestication process that may have taken as long as two thousand years, perhaps along the upper