I did a couple of posts on the fur colour of the African aurochs in the past, and all of them are more or less outdated. Yes, aurochs in Africa seem to have had a light colour saddle, but their colour was much more deviant than usually assumed.
It all depends on the nature of the bovines depicted in Egyptian tomb paintings. Van Vuure (2005) assumes those are all feral domestic cattle because of the horn shape depicted, but there are some that clearly show aurochs. One of them is the so-called “ostracon with fighting bulls”, which can be found on the internet. This inspired me to my painting of an aurochs bull with exactly that colour fighting off a lion in the Nile delta, which can be seen on my Instagram page.
But there are a number of depictions that suggest that there were even more deviant colour variants found in the North African aurochs populations. Looking at all of them, I did this reconstruction based on a skull at the Oran caves:
A list of tomb paintings suggesting this colour as much as what the genetic background of it might be can be found in my recently published book.
