The Aurochs in China

 

I have dubbed the skeleton above "the Jilin aurochs". It is the skeleton of a female, found in Gan'an County in 1998,  and dated to between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. It is held at the Jilin Museum in Changchun, China. 

Another view of the Jilin Aurochs

When I first saw this skeleton, I was immediately struck by how strange looking it is. The skull in particular has a very unusual character, it certainly doesn't look like any typical aurochs skull you would see in a western European museum. Through the magic of Google, I was able to find some more pictures of Chinese aurochs fossil material, and many of the skulls show showed the same unusual features as that of the Jilin aurochs. I wondered whether or not the apparent distinctiveness of these Chinese skulls was just an illusion, or if it had in fact been noted before, either in the literature or through the naming of separate subspecies.

 Well as it turns out, there have been aurochs subspecies described from China, but the taxon names are obscure and seem to have found little currency even in China itself.

To my knowledge, the first trinomen based specifically on Chines aurochs fossil material was Bos primigenius suxianensis, erected by Liu in 1980. I was unable to find the original description of this taxon. Bos primigenius suxianensis has since been used in a few publications describing aurochs fossils from China, including this paper, which briefly describes the huge horn cores below

Very long horn cores from Anhui, believed by Wanming, 1988 to be of late Pleistocene age.

Another trinomen based on Chinese fossil material is Bos primigenius dalianensis. This name appears to be virtually unused outside of the paper that originally established it; it does not even appear in any list of synonyms of Bos primigenius that I have found. 

The subspecies B. p. dalianensis was described in a 1992 paper, and is based on fossil horn cores from the seafloors of the Bohai Sea and Yellow Sea. According to an abstract of that paper (I can't access the full write up) the fossils are believed to be of late Pleistocene age.  I find it bizarre that the author/s chose to describe a subspecies based on horn cores when there is substantial, less fragmentary fossil material of the aurochs collected from China and Taiwan; but again, I can't access the paper, so I don't know what the exact details are.

I also find it bizarre that both the relative distinctiveness of skull fossils from China, as well as the existence of named Chinese subspecies seem completely unnoticed in western literature, while the African aurochs was named over a hundred years earlier on the basis of fossils which seem to have only minute and inconsistent differences from the European subspecies.

Then again, many sources assert that the aurochs skulls from China are overall very similar to those belonging to the nominate subspecies, B. p. primigenius, more famously known from Europe; indeed, Chinese aurochs specimens are often considered to belong to the aforementioned nominate subspecies. In this post, I'll provide some pictures of Chinese Aurochs skulls that I've collected, discuss the differences I perceive, and let the readers decide for themselves how morphologically distinct they appear. 

The first feature I noticed is that compared to European aurochs skulls, the Chinese skulls tend to be either very short or rather deep, or both. It's difficult for me to pin down exactly what the difference is because I don't know the absolute size of any Chinese skull in order to compare it side by side with a European one with each skull to scale. The second feature I noticed in most of the Chinese aurochs skulls I have seen is that the nasal are short, usually very narrow, often even seeming pinched, and  form a convex crest or ridge which rises above the plane of the frontals in many skulls. 

These photos show the narrow, raised nasals very well


An aurochs skull found in Beijing, showing the raised, convex nasal bones in profile

Altogether, these features give, to my eyes, a somewhat bisonesque character to these skulls, at least in profile view. While such peculiarities may be chalked up to poor reconstruction, I think it would be rather unusual if these same reconstruction artifacts independently occurred with so many different specimens. These features are not just limited to aurochs skulls from China proper, either; they're also apparent in the aurochs skull from the Baikal region (top right) below: 

Clockwise from left to right: aurochs skull from London, aurochs skull from Baikal region, aurochs skull from France, steppe bison skull from Canada.

The apparent shortness of the face, as I mentioned before, may be illusory, and/or may not be a general feature of Chinese Aurochs skulls. The three photos below however, show mounted skeletons which, judging purely from the photos, display extreme shortening of the facial region of the skull compared to typical European specimens

Judging by the small, weak horns, this might be a female

Judging by the larger horns, the skulls of the above two skeletons are more likely to come from bulls.

It would be helpful to know the absolute lengths of skull like these, but I haven't been able to find any measurements in English for East Asian aurochs skulls.

Perhaps this photo of two men with a relatively large middle or early-late Pleistocene aurochs skull from China can add some perspective on the size and proportions of Chinese aurochs skulls.

In Retracing the Aurochs, Cis Van Vuure stated that Aurochs skulls form Eastern Asia are very similar to those from Europe, more so than they are to skulls of Bos primigenus namadicus from South Asia. I would say that, judging only from photographs, I agree with this statement. The East Asian and European skulls have many obvious similarities: both have straight intercornual margins to the frontal bones, the eye sockets are very prominent, and the shape and orientation of the horns appears to vary within similar ranges.

These two Chinese skulls look particularly similar to typical European skulls, but its hard to say more without knowing their absolute sizes.
edit* I found another photo of the first skull from a different angle

That's about all I have to say regarding the morphology of the East Asian aurochs skulls. You may have noticed that so far I've focused exclusively on crania; well, there's good reason for that: not only are the post cranial skeletons of large bovines relatively non-distinctive, but observations based on post cranial fossils of Chinese aurochs, articulated or otherwise, aren't necessarily very reliable.

This is especially true if one is hoping to infer gross morphology from mounted skeletons; until recently, the only almost complete aurochs skeleton uncovered in China was that of the Jilin aurochs, which you can see at the top of this post; In 2008 another aurochs skeleton was discovered, this one in Pingchuan District in Baiyin. The skeleton was approximately 70% complete, though the skull appears to have been badly weathered.

Aurochs skeleton from Baiyin

To the best of my knowledge, all other aurochs skeletons on display in China are either composites, or fabricated from materials such as plaster. The proportions of the mounted chimaeras might not be reflective of the typical proportions of live individuals; for this reason, it is necessary to be very careful when referring to mounted skeletons to determine if the Chinese aurochs differed significantly in body morphology from the European one. 

Mounted composite skeletons at Dalian Natural History Museum (top) and Heilongjiang Provicial Museum (bottom)

As for the artificial skeletons, I personally do not know whether or not they are usually based on real fossils, or if they accurately reflect the proportions of the real thing.

I found these three photos on the website of a company which produces (among other things) imitation fossil skeletons for  museum exhibits.

Finally, there is the fact that there is a very high potential for misidentification of bovine fossils from China. In the Chinese range of the aurochs, the genera Bison and Bubalus were also present (though the former may not have occurred simultaneously with the aurochs-this has not been decisively settled) and the yak may well have been present also, depending on whether or not fossils assigned to it have been assigned correctly. Just recently, a study managed to establish the survival of the aurochs into the Neolithic in Northeast China after determining that fossils previously assigned to Bison exiguus on morphological grounds actually belonged to the aurochs.

Maybe this skeleton contains bones which  actually belonged to Bison; it would explain the massive spinous processes.

So, what is actually known specifically about the Aurochs in China?
The Earliest bone finds of the aurochs from China are dated to the late Middle Pleistocene, and as mentioned above, there is evidence that it survived into the neolithic (6,300 to 5,000 years BP) in at least some regions of the country..
There isn't currently any evidence of genetic contribution by indigenous East Asian aurochs to the gene pools of East Asian domestic cattle. It therefore seems highly probable that the East Asian aurochs populations, like their European counterparts, were never domesticated, and that they left no modern direct descendants (taurine cattle, on the other hand,  are proven to have experienced introgression from wild European aurochs). One particular mt-DNA haplogroup of the the aurochs, Haplogroup C, has been identified in more than one study as being indigenous to East Asia. The previously discussed fossils which had been misidentified as Bison exiguus were also determined to belong to this haplogroup. This genetic uniqueness, combined with the morphological evidence discussed previously, suggests that there may well have been a morphologically and genetically distinct population of the aurochs inhabiting Eastern Asia during the Pleistocene and early Holocene; ergo, Bos primigenius suxianensis almost certainly refers to a valid aurochs subspecies, to which at least those aurochs populations east of Lake Baikal probably belonged. Inexplicably, this important aspect of the biogegraphy of the aurochs seems to have been largely overlooked in western scientific writing, wherein only three subspecies of the aurochs are typically recognized: the nominate, primigenius from across Eurasia, namadicus from Southern and parts of Southwest Asia, and africanus (which I think may be actually be a junior synonym of mauritanicus) from North Africa. 

Ecologically speaking, the East Asian Aurochs populations seem to have been very similar to their West Eurasian counterparts. The fossil distribution in China is largely confined to the North of the Huaihe river,  roughly corresponding to Northern China and Northeast China. During the Pleistocene, the environment of  Northeast China, much like that of  Europe, alternated between cold steppe landscapes during glacial periods and warm forested environments during interglacials. In Chinese Paleoecological studies, the aurochs is often taken to be an indicator of warm, moist environments. Most of the aurochs fossils found in China hail from fluvio-lacustrine deposits, but a few have been found in loess deposits, leading to uncertainty about whether or not the aurochs retreated from the steppe regions during glacial periods. The morphological characteristics of the Chinese aurochs, as well as some other scanty, very circumstantial evidence I will discuss in another post, both lead me to wonder if the aurochs experienced phenotypically consequential introgression from Bison on the former's way across eastern Asia.

That's all I have to say for now. If you have any comments about the arguments in this post, or if you can clarify why the African subspecies of the aurochs is nowadays usually listed as africanus and not mauritanicus, and why some of the named Asian subspecies are virtually never recognized, please do comment below. 

See Also: The Indian Aurochs

*A word of attribution:

The photograph of the aurochs skull from the Baikal region which appears in this post was extracted from Cis Van Vuure's Retracing the Aurochs; the full image as it appeared in that work is shown below:

The leftmost image of a mounted Aurochs skeleton at Dalian Natural History Museum is by Steven Zhang ( @chasingmammoth ).

Unfortunately, at the time I saved most of these images I had not planned on writing this blog, and I never noted the appropriate attribution info. I will go through and add the attributions I can soon. If you see your photo here and you would like for it to be removed or attributed, please send an email to kutira12[at]gmail.com. Thank you.