How Now Brown Cow?

A recent study suggests that domestic cows come from a single founding population of ancient oxen.

Written byBob Grant

| 1 min read

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A JerseyWIKIMEDIA COMMONS, MAN VYI

It looks like ol' Bessie and 1.4 billion of her kin are the result of a genetic bottleneck. European researchers are claiming that the hoards of domestic cattle that exist today are descended from a small group of Eurasian wild ox called aurochs that roamed the Near East 10 millenia ago. In their genetic study, published this month in Molecular Biology and Evolution, scientists from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom compared mitochondrial DNA of 15 Neolithic to Iron Age Iranian cattle to sequences from modern domestic bovines to determine that 80 or so female aurochs were domesticated about 10,500 years ago and gave rise to today's millions of domestic cattle.

"This is a surprisingly small number of cattle," said University College London geneticist and ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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