Ancient Mongolian Aurochs Genomes Reveal Connections to East Asian Cattle

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Societies in East Asia have utilized domesticated cattle since approximately 5,000 years ago, but the origins of East Asian cattle remain understudied. Possible experimentation with management of wild aurochs (Bos primigenius) and other bovids has been hypothesized but not explored in detail. Here, we present newly sequenced genomes of ancient Mongolian aurochs from Tamsagbulag and Zaraa Uul. We explore bovine population dynamics through comparison with the genomes of ancient and modern domestic and wild bovine populations in Eurasia. Ancient Chinese cattle from the Bronze Age site of Shimao show evidence for gene flow from Mongolian aurochs, but this ancestry signal is lost in modern East Asian cattle. Mongolian aurochs ancestry appears distinct from aurochs in West Eurasia and from isolated native Japanese cattle breeds. We also discuss the evidence for human management of aurochs populations in East Asia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35842.0