Domestication of cattle: two or three events?
2019
Cattle have been invaluable for the transition of human society from nomadic hunter-gatherers
to sedentary farming communities throughout much of Europe, Asia and
Africa since the earliest domestication of cattle more than 10,000 years ago.
Although current understanding of relationships among ancestral populations remains
limited, domestication of cattle is thought to have occurred on two or three
occasions, giving rise to the taurine (Bos taurus) and indicine (Bos indicus) species that
share the aurochs (Bos primigenius) as common ancestor ~250,000 years ago. Indicine
and taurine cattle were domesticated in the Indus Valley and Fertile Crescent, respectively;
however, an additional domestication event for taurine in the Western
Desert of Egypt has also been proposed. We analysed medium density Illumina
Bovine SNP array (~54,000 loci) data across 3,196 individuals, representing 180 taurine
and indicine populations to investigate population structure within and between
populations, and domestication and demographic dynamics using approximate
Bayesian computation (ABC). Comparative analyses between scenarios modelling
two and three domestication events consistently favour a model with only two episodes
and suggest that the additional genetic variation component usually detected
in African taurine cattle may be explained by hybridization with local aurochs in
Africa after the domestication of taurine cattle in the Fertile Crescent. African indicine
cattle exhibit high levels of shared genetic variation with Asian indicine cattle
due to their recent divergence and with African taurine cattle through relatively recent
gene flow. Scenarios with unidirectional or bidirectional migratory events between
European taurine and Asian indicine cattle are also plausible, although further
studies are needed to disentangle the complex human-mediated
dispersion patterns
of domestic cattle. This study therefore helps to clarify the effect of past demographic
history on the genetic variation of modern cattle, providing a basis for further
analyses exploring alternative migratory routes for early domestic populations.
Keywords:
- Correction
- Source
- Cite
- Save
- Machine Reading By IdeaReader
58
References
38
Citations
NaN
KQI