Ancient Mitogenomes Reveal the Domestication and Distribution of Cattle During the Longshan Culture Period in North China.

Xing Zhang,Xingbo Zhao,Liu Yang,Lingyun Hou,Hai Xiang,Hua Li

doi:10.3389/fgene.2021.759827

Xing Zhang, Xingbo Zhao + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2021.759827

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Abstract

Cattle, as an important tool for agricultural production in ancient China, have a complex history of domestication and distribution in China. Although it is generally accepted that ancient Chinese taurine cattle originated from the Near East, the explanation regarding their spread through China and whether or not this spread was associated with native aurochs during ancient times are still unclear. In this study, we obtained three nearly complete mitochondrial genomes (mitogenomes) from bovine remains dating back ca. 4,000 years at the Taosi and Guchengzhai sites in North China. For the first time at the mitogenome level, phylogenetic analyses confirmed the approximately 4,000-year-old bovines from North China as taurine cattle. All ancient cattle from both sites belonged to the T3 haplogroup, suggesting their origin from the Near East. The high affinity between ancient samples and southern Chinese taurine cattle indicated that ancient Chinese cattle had a genetic contribution to the taurine cattle of South China. A rapid decrease in the female effective population size ca. 4.65 thousand years ago (kya) and a steep increase ca. 1.99 kya occurred in Chinese taurine cattle. Overall, these results provide increasing evidence of the origin of cattle in the middle Yellow River region of China.

Highlights

As one of the earliest domesticated animals (Diamond, 2002), cattle provide meat, dairy products, and leather and played an important role in cultivation and other agricultural activities in the past 13,000 years (Ebersbach, 2002). According to their morphological characteristics and living habits, modern cattle are divided into humpless group and humped group. Both archeological and genetic evidence have demonstrated that taurine cattle and zebu cattle were independently domesticated from aurochs in the Near East approximately 10,500 years before present (YBP) (Ajmone-Marsan et al, 2010) and in the Indus Valley approximately 8,500 YBP (Loftus et al, 1994), respectively, and separately spread to the rest of the world following human migrations (Patel, 2009; Felius et al, 2014)
Analyses of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) D-loop sequences revealed that the northern Chinese breeds originated from taurine cattle, the southern breeds originated from zebu cattle, whereas the central Chinese cattle breeds were of hybrid origin (Zhang et al, 2015)
By determining all ancient samples as taurine cattle, no zebu population was found in these sites, providing further evidence that zebu cattle did not spread to northern China 4,000 YBP (Yue et al, 2014)

Summary

Introduction

As one of the earliest domesticated animals (Diamond, 2002), cattle provide meat, dairy products, and leather and played an important role in cultivation and other agricultural activities in the past 13,000 years (Ebersbach, 2002). According to their morphological characteristics and living habits, modern cattle are divided into humpless group (taurine, Bos taurus) and humped group (zebu, Bos indicus). Further genome analyses suggested that at least two historical migration events occurred in Chinese cattle in northern China (Chen et al, 2018)

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