“Cattle are one of the most important animals in human history,” says Mikkel Sinding, a postdoctoral researcher in the biology department at the University of Copenhagen. Yet for all the value cows have held for human beings past and present, Sinding says, “we still don’t actually fully know where they came from.” All we know for certain is that cattle came from aurochs, their larger, fiercer, extinct wild ancestor. In a new study of ancient aurochs genomes published in Nature, Sinding and other researchers have shed light on the deep…
