The Re-Origin of Species by Torill Kornfeldt

Author:Torill Kornfeldt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI008000, NAT046000, SCI010000, SCI029000, SCI020000, SCI100000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2018-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

If It Walks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck — Is It an Aurochs?

When the Red Army was marching on Berlin, Hermann Göring is said to have gone out to his country estate, Carinhall, and personally shot his cattle to prevent their falling into Russian hands. His sense of priorities may strike us as being more than usually unhinged for a man about to lose a war. Presumably, Göring was convinced that he was acting in the best interests of the Aryans — the Aryan breed of cattle, that is, rather than some human variety. The thing is, he believed his cattle were aurochs.

Nearly 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, when the thick glaciers retreated and melted, broadleaved forests gradually spread to cover large areas of Europe. These were not dense forests, but park-like areas with numerous open spaces and quite large areas of steppe. They were full of animals. In southern Sweden, for example, there were small mammoths, giant deer, musk oxen, wild horses, European bison, and the majestic aurochs.

Like many other Swedes, I first encountered an aurochs in the shape of Mura, the cute, shaggy cow from The Hedenhös Children, a series of books about a Stone Age family. In real life, aurochs were probably rather intimidating. They varied in size across Europe, achieving the greatest stature in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. Aurochs bulls could reach 1.8 metres at the shoulders and weigh as much as one-and-a-half tonnes, while the cows were slightly smaller. Their horns, which could be up to a metre in length, were light-coloured, with a darker tip. The aurochs had short hair, the bulls being blackish-brown, while the cows were more reddish in colour.

When the glaciers retreated, successive waves of people spread across Europe, all of them keen hunters. While the mammoths and giant deer disappeared rapidly, the aurochs and bison remained. Several thousand years later, people began to domesticate the aurochs in the regions that are now Turkey and Pakistan, and most probably in North Africa, too. The two or three lineages of tame aurochs that emerged were the forebears of all the cattle alive today. Once domesticated, they became smaller and more biddable, and they were bred to reach sexual maturity earlier, to calve from an earlier age, and to have more offspring. As a result of long-term selective breeding, today’s cows grow rapidly and give more milk. But they are infinitely less resilient than their forebears in terms of defending themselves against wolves or surviving cold winters.

Gradually, as the European landscape evolved, with great forests giving way to towns and farmland, the remaining wild aurochs were displaced into remote areas. By the 13th century, they were confined to the eastern part of the continent: Poland, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Lithuania. They kept going longest in Poland, where, in the 16th century, the king decreed that farmers were to put out hay to help them survive in winter. Hunting aurochs was the prerogative of the nobility, and ultimately only royalty retained that right; poaching was punishable by death.

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