If you cook a man a steak you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to raise cattle you create civilization.
We think of farm animals and pets as species that we domesticated, but it would be equally true to say that they domesticated us. The co-evolution of humans and dogs has been well documented, but given that dogs made humans better hunters, how did we ever manage to domesticate prey animals like cattle, and how did they civilize us?
Modern domestic cattle and zebus are both descended from wild aurochs which went extinct only 400 years ago. Cattle, however, are among the most populous animals on the planet, so you could say that aurochs have gained a degree of immortality. It's no wonder the Hindus revere them as reincarnated souls.
And after all, why not? If you were alive 10,000 years ago and you observed a local herd of aurochs that tended to follow your nomadic band of hunters around, that would pique your Cro-Mangon curiosity. Why does your food keep you within eyeshot but just out of reach?
The carrion feeders you understand: they eat the garbage you leave behind like the fabled first dogs who were said to be a pack of hungry, curious wolves. But aurochs don't eat carrion, they feed on grass. And like other herd animals they're vulnerable to your group hunting tactics so aurochs are understandably skittish. But these particular ones are behaving predictably for some reason, and they're the only herd animals you've ever seen behave predictably. With a little planning, your tribe could wipe them out in a day and feast for a year.
There are really only three ways to interpret such behavior. Either you see their stupidity as your good fortune so you hunt the herd and their behavior to extinction. Then every new herd of aurochs you encounter will retreat out of sight, and the hunt will never match that one glorious day when you killed that stupid bull that led his herd into your trap.
Or you might come to see the herd as your kindred spirits, perhaps the reincarnated souls of your fallen tribesmen watching over you from afar. Or you may simply recognize the practical benefits of maintaining a breeding population of aurochs nearby, slaughtering only the older ones or those that leave the herd on their own. Either way, you'll soon put it together that this irrational behavior breeds true, and then your ancestors will learn to exploit that trait to domesticate the herd.
And irrational though it may seem to you, from the aurochs' perspective it makes perfect sense to stay close to a dangerous yet benign pack of violent ape-men. They're a menace to predators and prey alike, making loud and unpleasant noises, starting fires on purpose like maniacs, and killing anything that gets too close. So the aurochs who are lucky enough to range near a tribe with enough sense not to hunt them to extinction will be safe from wolves, tigers and bears, and they won't have to compete with mammoths or buffalo for food.
It is believed that all 1.5 billion of today's Taurine cattle descended from just 80 aurochs tamed in Turkey sometime around 10,500 years ago. It couldn't have been easy to domesticate that herd, what with the inevitable interbreeding with wild herds making it difficult to keep track of which offspring carry the recessive don't-fear-humans trait.
It would have taken a few human lifetimes to solidify that tamable aurochs trait, mostly by spreading it to the surrounding wild herds. The interbreeding they thought was working against them actually worked for them: it wasn't until the surrounding wild herds inherited the tamable trait that the captive herd was finally domesticated.
Before getting to that point, humans would've needed some way to corral and tag the animals so somebody had to invent fences and writing. But to make that possible, they had to invent civilization first. As it happened, both civilization and cattle domestication occurred together. Indeed, neither was possible without the other.
So it was that when the tribes of Isreal recently freed from their bondage in Egypt reverted to the pagan ways of their ancestors, they chose a golden calf to worship. Their choice of idol was no idle choice: their ancestors revered the calf as the seed from which civilization sprang forth. It was an all too common example of a decadent society turning its collective back on God to worship itself instead, which is why it brought the wrath of Moses down upon the Israelites when he returned from Mount Sinai.
The domestication of cattle is a human achievement, yes, but we do not deserve all or even most of the credit. Just remember the brutes we were before we had herds to shepherd. Whether you believe chance favored a prepared mind or divine intervention brought man and cow together—and why couldn't it be both?—aurochs could not become cattle until mankind became civilized. We owe our modern maturity to our fellow beasts and their willingness to put up with us.
