All modern cows descended from single herd

A genetic study of cattle has claimed that all modern domesticated bovines are descended from a single herd of wild ox, which lived 10,500 years ago.



A team of geneticists from the National Museum of Natural History in France, the University of Mainz in Germany, and UCL in the UK excavated the bones of domestic cattle on archaeological sites in Iran, and then compared those to modern cows.



The team found that the differences that show up between the two populations could only have arisen if a relatively small number of animals -- approximately 80 -- had been domesticated from a now-extinct species of wild ox, known as aurochs, which roamed across Europe and Asia.



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