This study was conducted in collaboration with Dan Bradley´s group in Dublin and Jean-Denis Vigne in Paris (Bollongino 2005, Bollongino et al. 2006, Edwards et al. 2007).
We sequenced bovine mitochondrial DNA from ca. 60 archaeological sites of the Early Neolithic ranging geographically from the Near East to the British Isles. Amongst them were aurochses (Bos primigenius) and domestic cattle (Bos taurus).
Figure 1: Network of mitochondrial HVR I Sequences of european neolithic auerochses (P) and domesticated cattles (T). The great genetic distance between P and T group shows, that the domesticated form not belong to the european wildpopulation. (from Bollongino 2005).
Interestingly, the European domestic cattle are not part of the primigenius cluster and the TMRCA of both groups is older than 200 ka (fig. 1). Thus, we can say that European cattle were not domesticated from European wild aurochs populations. The few preserved lineages we found in Anatolia and the Near East are identical with the European domestic lineages, favouring a Near Eastern origin of all European cattle.
Johannes Gutenberg University
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Ruth Bollongino,