10 Sept
The 21st-century back-to-the-farm movement stems from our yearning to escape the artificiality of modern urban life.
Yet the domesticated plants and animals now found in most gardens and farms are themselves artificial, the results of extensive human meddling, cross-breeding and genetic manipulation. Mankind began engineering what we now call “farm animals,” including cattle, all the way back in the Neolithic period, between 10,000 and 5,000 B.C.
Try as you might, you won’t find an untamed Jersey cow that originated naturally in the wild, because no such thing exists — just like there’s no such thing as a wild labradoodle. Cattle are entirely human-made, molded over thousands of years from long extinct, ancestral species.
But that could change.
A small group of determined visionaries are on a mission that seems ripped straight from the plot of a (farm-obsessed) sci-fi novel: Resurrecting a species of prehistoric bovines, called aurochs, which have been extinct for centuries.
Wild aurochs were bigger and leaner than domesticated cattle. Centuries of human intervention and selective breeding gradually transformed them into docile, milk-heavy dairy cows and beef cattle. Most Americans have only ever heard of aurochs when name-dropped in Game of Thrones, and likely assume they’re mythical creatures. Not only were they real, they were once dominant: million-strong herds thundered across Eurasia and North Africa. Sadly, The last recorded aurochs perished in a Polish forest in 1627.
