(I have had this reply page open for about 4 days, slowly gathering research...I was stupid enough to hit the preview button without copying all of my reply, where my session timed out and Chrome won't let me confirm form resubmission; I have lost the original cache files. I am going to cry. But not until I try to write from memory what I lost)
So what was the mechanism of Auroch domestication?
No clue. All I know so far are mostly facts from this
article (which is the source of the link I posted earlier): that all non-zebu cattle today descend from a herd of 80 aurochs cows in the Near East approximately 10.5k years ago, and that this herd was augmented by several wild bull 'visits' over the course of early domestication. The authors also note that the earliest confirmed sites of cattle domestication are at settlements ~250 km apart (About a week's travel on foot), and they suggest that the domestication effort was started by sedentary people (not to say the animals were necessarily kept near the village -- the herd(s) would have likely been managed by a few people from the villages with the villages themselves as a base, as in a lot of modern instances) and that the proximity of the villages would serve to share herding information, making husbandry more efficient.
This link also seems to give some insight on early techniques (scroll to (c) Cattle domestication) but still does not give us any idea on what first inspired people to keep aurochs.
Leaving aside the successful herd of 80 for a moment, a clue might be found in the
Nabta Playa, a depression south of the Nile which people first seemed to inhabit around 10-8,000 years ago, the settlements indicating they were seasonally inhabited. It's been suggested by some (
source for the next couple of sentences) that the climatic conditions, though wetter, couldn't have supported large game without some form of human control, yet there are cattle bones scattered about (which are all morphologically wild). This view has been considered inaccurate as a biome that can support small African game can typically support large African game as well, and the faunal records of Nabta are rather incomplete. If you keep scrolling down, the 'third way' suggested by the author is interesting; as the land got drier, it would have been necessary to manually select the aurochs herd(s) they depended on for the survival of both the herd and the tribe, practicing loose herd management techniques. The increasing aridity might have caused these people scattered about to band together and share information. A few millenia later, there are clear signs of transhumance and seasonal pastoralism (at that time the Mesopotamian livestock package arrived too, with
their cattle). This
book also seems to say something similar.
Well, the Nabta Playa might turn out to be a red herring for me (sigh) but I still gleaned some pretty useful information and insight.
We can also look at some semi-domesticated animals, such as reindeer and gayal. Most reindeer herders simply follow their herd to new pasture, and loose selection is employed. The reindeer associate the human camps with safety and extra care. Obviously the ones that weren't keen on this would leave the herd or become selected through other means. Many gayal herds are largely left to tend to themselves most of the day, and return to the villages to be fed and cared for. Both of these animals are not aurochsen but we can still attempt to apply some of their data on them.
Now to hopefully answer your quote, and taking all these facts into mind, if I had to
guess, this
might be similar to what happened:
- A culture grows increasingly reliant on aurochs.
- A change in environment or something similar presents a risk to the access of aurochs -or- aurochs need to be hunted with greater efficiency (or both). The concept of making sure the aurochs have access to the proper sustenance may be present as well.
- A very loose manner of herd management is practiced along with hunting, clearing fields for grazing and driving herds to those locations with burning. Access to water may also be considered.
- As desertification increases, or through other methods, tribes may tend to group together, sharing information.
- Simple herd management may lend itself to a sort of semi-pastoralism, following the herds as they migrate in addition to using 'controlled' burns to drive them from pasture to pasture. Perhaps also the herds would become slightly more accustomed to human encampments. Alternatively, sedentary or semi-sedentary villages could coax herds close like the gayal, providing them with a source of water or food.
- Eventually, the traditional methods prove to still be quite difficult, and it doesn't help that people are needing convenient access to a source of fat -- aurochs. The bulls, though easy hunting targets, are a serious problem. Some way or another, a group of likely sedentary people wind up procuring a founder population of somewhere around 80 cows, and tend to them closely. The lack of bulls would make tending slightly easier, and if they are young, growing up with humans will make them a bit less flighty. Land is still burned and the herds are still driven to new pasture when need be. To make sure the small and slowly growing herd is fed, fodder is collected and heaped near the herder's camp (or near the village), and water is also provided in the form of rivers and watering holes close by human habitation. Wild bulls occasionally come by and mate with the herd, adding genetic diversity. Aggressive bulls and troublesome animals are culled from the herd.
I don't think that's how that happened exactly, but at least it's put in a semi-feasible sounding hypothesis. What I do know for certain though, and what has been established by science is that it was
difficult. Likely much moreso than any other domestic animal. It still baffles me as to how people obtained 80 head of aurochs cows. Did they get them from proto-herders? Were they originally part of a small herd themselves that got coaxed in by a village? Was this a stroke of ingenuity and each individual cow captured from the rest of their herd? There's still so much I don't know at this point, and it seems that archaeoanthropology hasn't collected a lot of data either. I wish there was someone qualified enough in this forum to answer these questions for us. I think if we have to go further on this I'm going to have to start a new thread.
One thing is for certain -- the very fact that mankind managed to tame the aurochs into the cattle today can likely be considered the eighth wonder of the world.
Back on the subject of American bison, if we assume a dependence > wild herd management > semi-wild pastoralism > domestication attempts strategy with aurochs, then there might already be some interesting and viable starting material already for alternate histories: Plains Indians and some other culture groups already continually burned the land to allow for grass and similar forage to grow to provide food for bison, the herd migrations were already followed and bison were already driven around, often times into corrals called buffalo pounds where they were trapped and easier to kill. Only thing is OTL bison were just so dang numerous back then, and the system probably seemed good enough so didn't go further than that, though it doesn't in any way rule out ATLs with bison domestication. I could probably even see one with a gaur/gayal-like approach, coaxing a herd with food and taming them to use for sacrifice and later as a beast of burden.
Regarding the aurochs debate, one important thing: it is highly suspected that cattle formed from the mostly unknown Indian subspecies of the aurochs, which was presumably more tameable than the European one. Unfortunately, wild Indian aurochs vanished much earlier (before Alexander the Great era) and they are only known by their subfossils.
You're probably thinking of
B. p. indicus, the Indian aurochs, which is the progenitor of Indian zebu cattle or brahman. The other cattle however, the kind popular outside of south and southeast Asia, are descended from 80
B. p. primigenius cows from the Fertile Crescent, which, as they expanded elsewhere, bred with wild (non-captive)
B. p. primigenius bulls.
Wellp, it's 5:59 AM and I think I've finally finished this dang post. I waive all responsibility for paragraphs that do not make sense...

(Man, I wish you could save drafts on this site...)