Above is part of the pre-historic cave paintings at Lascaux in the Dordogne region of south-west France (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International). The creatures that still show clearly are deer (bottom centre), wild horse (top centre) and aurochs (centre right and left). Aurochs are extinct the last recorded female dying in Poland in the 17th century; archaeological evidence from the British Isles suggests that aurochs lived here during the early Ice Ages, probably benefitting from grazing on grasses migrating north during inter-glacial warm episodes. So did hunter-gatherer groups of homo-sapiens (people) hunt to extinction the last aurochs as the Devensian (last Ice Age) icesheets retreated or had their ancestors roamed south, never to return?
It is tempting to suppose that aurochs were the evolutionary ancestor of modern breeds of cattle, an assumption that Charles Darwin probably made. However modern research suggests otherwise (DNA and all that), this, presumably, suggesting that modern cattle had a different (but similar) ancestor. Evidence for the domestication of cattle goes back as far as that of the dog with many references in the Old Testament to domesticated cattle being a form of currency.
In inter-glacial periods the auroch would have had few natural predators being such a large and powerful animal with fearsome horns powered by huge neck muscles, the young would have been more vulnerable to pack carnivores. Whether the prehistoric aurochs were more at home in inter-glacial temperate forests, forging there way through the undergrowth, or in herds on open grassland like, for example, the American bison seems unclear; maybe both.
It seems that some scientifically minded men in Holland experimented in evolving-back cross-breeding of cattle to try to get back to aurochs, this hasn’t happened but a breed called Heck cattle has many of the characteristics of aurochs, including a fierceness which makes them difficult to deal with.
Aurochs were sentient creatures.
(to be continued)