The weird proto-aurochs from the Pleistocene of India

I actually wanted to include this in my upcoming book – which will be published soon – but it turned out to be too speculative for my taste. It is about this skull from the Middle Pleistocene of India: 

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As you can see, the horns are very wide-ranging, but unfortunately not preserved completely. In order to get a more complete picture of what the horns might have looked like in life, I sculpted a little head bust in trophy-style to reconstruct the horns three-dimensionally.

I only know a couple of photos of this skull, of which none are in a clear profile shot, but I was able to replicate the horn cores rather exactly based on the photos. Then I sculpted the horn sheaths over them. This is the result:

While the actual morphology of the head and horns is based on osteological evidence, the colour is entirely speculative. As these Middle Pleistocene aurochs are very likely outside the taurine + indicine clade, I played a bit with my fantasy regarding the colour. It could well be possible that it had the “standard” aurochs colour, especially considering the fact that Java banteng have an almost identical colour to the “standard” colour.

All in all, based on what I have seen from Bos acutifrons so far, I think the idea that there was a morphological continuum from acutifrons to namadicus to primigenius is not far-fetched. Interestingly, the earliest record of aurochs is currently from Tunisia. In the Early Pleistocene in Africa, there was another species of catte that had, just like acutifrons, large and very wide-ranging horns as well, Bos buiaensis. I think it is not entirely impossible that acutifrons and buiaensis were conspecific and ranged across two continents (just like primigenius) and gave rise to the aurochs. But without any genetic information, which would also be needed from Leptobos, Epileptobos and Pelorovis, it is impossible to resolve the exact origins of the aurochs – at least currently.

 

So, was namadicus a distinct species, Bos namadicus, or a subspecies of Bos primigenius? This question is, in the lack of a clear species definition, impossible to answer and thus is up to the author’s preference. Another problem is that since species evolve gradually, that “transitional forms” and “real species” are just arbitrary categories based on the time we live in, which we choose as an arbitrary anchor. If species A evolves into species B, and species B into C, the transitional species between B and C would be regarded as a “true” species for its time, and would relate to the transitional species from A to B like a “true” species, making A, B, and C merely “transitional” forms. We can expand that problem even further. Species A and C, if they would for some reason meet each other, might not be able to reproduce with each other, but the species B can reproduce with both of them, making A, B and C one ring species across time. We could trace that back to the very ancestors of all life. The species concept does not work across time, I think. Just some thoughts.