Re-creating the extinct aurochs?
by Carl Wieland
In the 1940s, Professor Heinz Heck, and his brother Lutz, of the Munich and Berlin
zoos, claimed to have re-created an aurochs by cross-breeding various European cattle
with each other. (Grzimeks Tierleben, DeutscherTaschenbuch Verlag, October
1979, pp. 375-381.) The aurochs was the original wild bull of Europe, the ancestor
of European domestic cattle. It was a massively powerful creature standing almost
two metres (six feet) at its shoulder. Julius Caesar, in describing its size and
strength, compared it with an elephant.
As the cattle family tree shows, such a reconstruction should
theoretically be possible, since modem breeds have not ‘evolved’ from
their wilder ancestor, but ‘devolved’ through selection (see chart next
two pages), so each carries less information than the aurochs. In theory, therefore,
allowing them to freely recombine this information could result in all of it being
lumped together again in one population. In practice, however, there are problems.
There is a vast number of different chromosomal combinations possible, some of the
information may have been in lines that died out and degenerative mutations may
have played a role, so that it is not likely that the Heck brothers had a ‘carbon
copy’ of the aurochs. Nevertheless, some of the aurochs features were indeed
‘recreated’. New Scientist reports that breeders in South Africa
are close to ‘resurrecting’ the extinct quagga from plains zebra stock.
(‘Born-again quagga defies extinction’, New Scientist, November
30, 1991, p. 8.)
The aurochs , or wild bull, as depicted in the famous Lascaux cavepinitings
(Cro-magnon). The last aurochs died in 1627 in Poland. It was probably quite similar
to the original kind.
Contemplating such ‘re-creations’ helps us understand better the way
in which many breeds have been ‘split off’ from one ancestral group,
which in turn was one of many such groups which themselves ‘split off’
from the original created kind.
Shown overleaf is a possible, reasonable reconstruction. As selective breeding and/or
natural selection in different niches ‘chooses’ a portion of the original
information contained in the ancestor population, the information not selected for
is ‘rejected’ in that line. Daughter populations thus have less information
and therefore less potential for further variation. That such devolutionary diversification
can take place in only a few generations is shown by man’s selecting efforts.
Particularly in the early centuries after Noah’s Flood, with rapid migration/
dispersal and many empty niches, selection pressure would have been unusually high
in any case. Most texts would (misleadingly) label such downhill (information-losing)
change as the ‘evolution’ of cattle. They assume that the ancestor of
cattle evolved from noncattle—for which there is no fossil evidence. [For
further reading at general level, see Cattle of the World by John Friend
(Blandford, UK, 1978);note that no information was available on, for example, mtDNA
(mitochondrial DNA) comparisons which could more accurately define some of the relationships.
Also, not all known varieties could be represented and all such charts are, of necessity,
simplifications. Domesticated lines in particular would have seen much crossflow
of genetic information.]
Footnotes
* All bison have 14 pairs of ribs, not the 13 typical of cattle. However, since
they (and all the Bos group) freely interbreed with each other (offspring may not
always be fertile), they are unlikely to be a separate created kind. Rib numbers
may reflect the variability in the original baramin, or kind (the yak also has 14
pairs) or else a mutation in regulatory genes (duplicating or deleting existing
information, not creating any) may have become fixed in certain lines.
** True buffalo do not voluntarily interbreed with the other members of the cattle
family. This raises the possibility that they descended from a separate created
kind, in which the similarities are due to common design, not common gene pool.
However, this is not necessarily true, since as Harvard’s Richard Lewontin
admits (The Genetic Basis for Evolutionary Change, 1974, p. 186), substantial
species divergence can occur without requiring the postulate of ‘novel genes’
by mutation.
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