ABSTRACT
In a paper originally given at a colloquium at the British Museum in 1988 and in another published in 1991 — “An African origin for African cattle?” — I advanced the hypothesis that modern Sanga cattle in Africa might have originated in the domestic cattle of early Dynastic, or even pre-Dynastic, Egypt, and that modern Sangas are taxonomically distinct from both taurine cattle (Bos taurus) and humped -zebu-cattle (B. indicus) (Grigson 1991, 1996). The rather scanty evidence presented for this view was largely pictorial and based on the similarity between some modern longhorn Sanga cattle and those depicted in ancient Egypt. This view is in contradistinction to the widely-held belief that Sanga cattle originated as crosses between zebu and taurine cattle, and contends that their zebu-like appearance is attributable to relatively recent crossing with imported zebu. Interbreeding with both taurines and zebu has been so intense since the decimation of cattle populations in Africa caused by rinderpest and other diseases in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that in many places the original local cattle have been either eliminated or outbred into new forms that bear little, if any, resemblance, either genetically or anatomically, to those of the past. The paper also suggested that Sanga cattle were the original cattle over the entire continent and that they were often quite small. It implied that in West Africa the humpless, short-horned cattle of West Africa are not derived from imported taurines, but like the larger, longer horned N’Dama cattle, are of the same ultimate origin as Sangas. The conclusion was that African cattle are, or were until recently, basically African, arguably comprising a separate taxon, B. africanus.
