Toeing the Line: Geometric Morphometric Analysis of Neolithic Aurochs Phalanxes from Tamsagbulag, Mongolia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Divergent Paths, Shared Histories: Examining Archaeological Trends from the Caucasus to Mongolia" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Cattle domestication is well understood in Europe and the Near East, however the same cannot be said for East Asia. While cattle were long thought to have been introduced from Western Eurasia, increasing evidence suggests that the management of indigenous aurochs predated this introduction (Brunson et al. Nd; Zhao et al. 2021). Theoretical approaches to domestication now recognize it as a multilocal process involving multiple independent domestication episodes and introgression from local wild and managed herds (Zeder 2015). Genetic evidence points to the likelihood of several domestication episodes in Europe, with frequent interbreeding between wild and domestic cattle (Cubric-Curik et al. 2022), and there may have been similar processes occurring in Mongolia, with the site of Tamsagbulag as a potential “groundzero” . Geometric Morphometrics (GMM) provides an opportunity to better understand morphological changes associated with the domestication processes. A GMM analysis of the first and second phalanxes from Neolithic settlements at Tamsagbulag revealed that the Tamsagbulag aurochs are a morphologically distinct group. Difference in phalanx morphology observed between species appear to be the result of the differential locomotive demands imposed by a species’ natural habitat. GMM enables us to better understand domestication processes in historically understudied regions like Mongolia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Divergent Paths, Shared Histories: Examining Archaeological Trends from the Caucasus to Mongolia

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52499