Wildlife of Britain

Ancestry of Cattle & Sheep: What Are Cows and Sheep Descendant From? Modern agriculture often makes animals like cows and sheep feel fixed and familiar—categories of livestock that have always existed in their current forms.  But biologically, neither species appeared in anything like their present domesticated state.  Both are the end result of long evolutionary histories shaped by climate change, migration, extinction, and finally, human selective breeding. To understand what cows and sheep are “descended from,” we need to separate two timelines: • Deep evolutionary ancestry (millions of years of natural evolution) • Recent domestication history (thousands of years of human influence) The story begins long before farms, and even before humans existed. The Deep Ancestry of Cattle Modern domestic cattle belong to the species Bos taurus (and its close relative Bos indicus, the zebu). Their evolutionary story stretches back into the Pleistocene, a world of shifting grassland...