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Domestication of cattle: Two or three events? - PubMed

  • ️Mon Jan 01 2018

. 2018 Jul 23;12(1):123-136.

doi: 10.1111/eva.12674. eCollection 2019 Jan.

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Domestication of cattle: Two or three events?

Daniel Pitt et al. Evol Appl. 2018.

Abstract

Cattle have been invaluable for the transition of human society from nomadic hunter-gatherers to sedentary farming communities throughout much of Europe, Asia and Africa since the earliest domestication of cattle more than 10,000 years ago. Although current understanding of relationships among ancestral populations remains limited, domestication of cattle is thought to have occurred on two or three occasions, giving rise to the taurine (Bos taurus) and indicine (Bos indicus) species that share the aurochs (Bos primigenius) as common ancestor ~250,000 years ago. Indicine and taurine cattle were domesticated in the Indus Valley and Fertile Crescent, respectively; however, an additional domestication event for taurine in the Western Desert of Egypt has also been proposed. We analysed medium density Illumina Bovine SNP array (~54,000 loci) data across 3,196 individuals, representing 180 taurine and indicine populations to investigate population structure within and between populations, and domestication and demographic dynamics using approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). Comparative analyses between scenarios modelling two and three domestication events consistently favour a model with only two episodes and suggest that the additional genetic variation component usually detected in African taurine cattle may be explained by hybridization with local aurochs in Africa after the domestication of taurine cattle in the Fertile Crescent. African indicine cattle exhibit high levels of shared genetic variation with Asian indicine cattle due to their recent divergence and with African taurine cattle through relatively recent gene flow. Scenarios with unidirectional or bidirectional migratory events between European taurine and Asian indicine cattle are also plausible, although further studies are needed to disentangle the complex human-mediated dispersion patterns of domestic cattle. This study therefore helps to clarify the effect of past demographic history on the genetic variation of modern cattle, providing a basis for further analyses exploring alternative migratory routes for early domestic populations.

Keywords: Bos Taurus; Bos indicus; SNP array; approximate Bayesian computation; demographic modeling; domestication history.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1

Hypothesized main domestication sites and migration routes of taurine (Bos taurus) and indicine (Bos indicus) cattle, including the postulated third domestication site in Egypt. Lesser migration routes, such as the dispersal across Europe, are not depicted

Figure 2
Figure 2

Example of two initial modelled scenarios for determining the domestication history of cattle using approximate Bayesian computation (

ABC

). Scenario 1 models only two domestication events (black circles) that coincide with the divergence of taurine and indicine cattle. Scenario 4 models three domestication events: one in indicine cattle prior to divergence within the indicine group and two within taurine cattle, after divergence within the taurine group

Figure 3
Figure 3

Admixture individual assignment plots for 179 cattle populations and one auroch sample for K = 2, 3, 4 and 70. Each vertical bar represents an individual, and the proportion of each colour in that bar corresponds to the ancestry (genetic variation) of an individual deriving from a given cluster

Figure 4
Figure 4

Multidimensional scaling (

MDS

) plot of 3,197 individuals belonging to 180 populations of Bos primigenius primigenius, Bos indicus, Bos taurus and hybrids

Figure 5
Figure 5

Neighbour‐net using

FST

distances for 174 populations of Bos indicus, Bos taurus and hybrids featuring more than one sample (see Supporting Information Table S1 for label information). Scale for

FST

distance is displayed in the top left

Figure 6
Figure 6

The three best‐modelled scenarios for the domestication history of cattle using approximate Bayesian computation (

ABC

). Domestication episodes and migratory events between populations are shown by black circles and arrows, respectively

Figure 7
Figure 7

Phylogenetic network of the inferred relationships between 12 cattle breeds estimated using TreeMix. Migration edges between breeds are shown as arrows pointing towards the recipient population and coloured according to the proportional ancestry received from the donor population. Scale bar is 10 times the mean standard error of the estimated entries in the covariance matrix

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