Gallery 1 of 16 · Before the farm

Wild ancestors

The mouflon, the bezoar ibex, the aurochs and the wild boar: the animals people hunted before they herded.

Wild, still living

The mouflon: the sheep before the shepherd

biologyhistory

Domestic sheep descend from the Asiatic mouflon, a wild sheep of the mountains from eastern Turkey to Iran. It is brown, short-coated and shy, with rams carrying heavy curled horns. Its coat is mostly hair and coarse kemp over a short woolly undercoat that it sheds each spring: the first "wool" was a seasonal down, not a fleece.

Every fleece in this museum began as the soft underlayer of this animal.

Sources: Zeder, "Domestication and early agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin," PNAS 105 (2008); M. L. Ryder, Sheep and Man (Duckworth, 1983)

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

Wild, still living

The bezoar ibex: wild goat of the Zagros

biologyhistory

The bezoar ibex (Capra aegagrus) ranges from Anatolia to Pakistan. Domestic goats come from it. Long before farming, hunters in the Zagros Mountains followed its herds, and the bones they left behind show the change from hunting to herding.

Goats gave the world mohair and cashmere; they started here.

Sources: Zeder and Hesse, "The Initial Domestication of Goats at Ganj Dareh," Science 287 (2000)

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

Extinct 1627

The aurochs: the giant behind every cow

biologyhistory

The aurochs (Bos primigenius) stood about six feet at the shoulder, with forward-curving horns. It roamed Europe, Asia and North Africa and was painted on the walls of Lascaux. The last known aurochs, a cow, died in 1627 in the Jaktorów forest in Poland.

All cattle, from the Florida Cracker to the Holstein, carry its blood.

Sources: van Vuure, Retracing the Aurochs (Pensoft, 2005); Larson and Fuller, "The Evolution of Animal Domestication," Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics 45 (2014)

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

Wild, worldwide

The wild boar: the pig that never left

biology

The wild boar (Sus scrofa) is the most widespread large wild mammal on Earth, from Spain to Japan. Unlike the aurochs, it never vanished: domestic pigs and wild boar can still interbreed, and escaped pigs go feral within a few generations.

The pig is the only farm animal whose wild ancestor still lives beside it.

Sources: Larson et al., "Worldwide Phylogeography of Wild Boar Reveals Multiple Centers of Pig Domestication," Science 307 (2005)

Illustration: Urbanicity house studio (SI-generated)

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