From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Wed Feb 10 2010 - 10:40:15 EST
http://news.discovery.com/animals/earliest-bull-beef-fossil.html Steak
Dinners Go Back 2.5 Million Years A new fossil skull of a bull confirms that
beef has been "what's for dinner" since the dawn of humans.
<http://omnikool.discovery.com/RealMedia/ads/click_lx.ads/news.discovery.com/animals/earliest-bull-beef-fossil.html/1564651330/Top3/default/empty.gif/5031526654557479305a454141676c77?x>
By Larry O'Hanlon | Tue Feb 9, 2010 04:05 AM ET
*THE GIST:*
- *A new early bull species shows that cattle and humans evolved
side-by-side.*
- *The fossil skull is a missing link between modern cattle and their
African ancestors.*
- *Early humans didn't herd cattle, but they most definitely hunted them
and ate them.*
------------------------------
The discovery of a new "missing link" species of bull dating to a million
years ago in Eritrea pushes back the beef steak dinner to the very dawn of
humans and cattle.
Although there is no evidence that early humans were actually herding early
cattle 2.5 million years ago, the early humans and early cattle certainly
shared the same landscape and beef was definitely on the menu all along, say
researchers.
The telltale fossil is a skull with enormous horns that belongs to the
cattle genus *Bos*. It has been reassembled from over a hundred shards found
at a dig that also contains early human remains, said paleontologist
Bienvenido Martinez-Navarro of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili in
Tarragona, Spain. Martinez is the lead author of a paper reporting the
discovery in the February issue of the journal *Quaternary International.*
"This means that the humans have been eating *Bos* since the beginnings of
the genus *Homo,*" said Martinez, referring to the genus to which humans
belong.
The million-year-old skull of the new *Bos* species, dubbed *Bos buiaensis*,
has features of both earlier and later forms of *Bos*, which make it
essentially a missing link between more modern cow-like species found in
Eurasia and the earlier African cattle ancestors found alongside hominids
and dating back 2.5 million years.
"The most important point is that this *Bos* connects the *African Bos* with
Eurasian bulls," and so confirms the long, uninterrupted coexistence of
humans and cattle from the earliest times, he told Discovery News.
There are some researchers who might take issue with some of the details of
the cattle family tree as Martinez and his colleagues have described it, but
the overall conclusion seems sound, commented Sandra Olsen, curator of
anthropology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
"One way or the other, hominids are associated with these creatures," Olsen
told Discovery News.
The distinctive horns of the new *Bos* also broach some other interesting
matters, said Olsen. For one thing, this was an animal that had to live out
in open areas, just like early humans. It's very hard to imagine any animal
with such long horns surviving in a forest, she said.
Then there is also a tantalizing resemblance between the newfound *Bos* and
depictions of bulls in ancient petroglyphs found in western Saudi Arabia --
along the route once taken by humans out of Africa. The rock art shows
exceptionally long-horned cattle being hunted by humans with bows, arrows
and dogs, Olsen said. The petroglyphs are at least 5,000 years old, she
said, but very hard to date exactly.
"(The new *Bos* species) look so much like the pictures in Saudi Arabia,"
said Olsen, "which people have thought were exaggerations."
The ancient pictures also include depictions of some of the other animals
known to have left Africa by the same route: lions, cheetahs and hyena, she
said.
The message from the new fossil echoes those being discovered about the
prehistory of other domesticated animals, including horses, which Olsen has
studied, in particular.
"We've seen over and over again," she said: "These are very long
relationships."
----[This List to be used for Eritrea Related News Only]----
