AFRICAN farmers domesticated their own cows some 9000 years ago, rather than importing them as had been supposed. The cows “are a progeny of Africa and quite distinct from later cattle invaders,” says Olivier Hanotte of the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi. “This shows that African pastoral societies are at least as old as those in the Middle East.”
Hanotte’s genetic analysis of African cattle shows that native cows were bred from African races of now-extinct wild oxen. Some pure African cattle remain in West Africa, but most have been interbred with Asian and European animals over the past 2000 years (Science, vol 296, p…
