The Alpha Hypothesis: Did Lateralized Cattle-Human Interactions Change the Script for Western Culture?

Abstract

Simple SummaryThe domestication of cattle was a key innovation early in the development of Western civilization. Cattle provided the main tractor force to enable broad-scale agriculture and the land transportation of goods. Their initial significance was religiously celebrated as the bull-like creator god ’El, in Canaan (modern day Lebanon and Syria), and for over 6000 years in Ancient Egypt as the sky-goddess Hathor, often depicted as a sacred cow. In addition, the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic logogram of a horned ox head profile viewed from either the left or right side was used to signify the concept of “wisdom”. Stylizations of the ox head logogram seen from the left, and not right side have recently been found used in Egyptian graffito dating from around 1900 BCE (Before the Common Era). The strings of symbols have provided the earliest known examples of writing using phonemes such as used in the modern Western alphabet. The use of the directionally-asymmetrical left side ox-head symbol to represent a specific phoneme subsequently migrated around the Eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea variously as ’al, ’el, alep, allup, eleph and alif in Ancient Semitic cultures, including Phoenician, Hebrew and Arabic, before becoming “alpha” in Ancient Greece by 700 BCE. For reasons that have not been fully understood, the ox-head symbol has always been positioned as the first letter in the lexicographical order of the respective Western languages. This review outlines the etymology of the strongly conserved position and directional asymmetry of the alpha symbol, and of its religious connection. In the light of recent behavioural studies, the hypothesis was presented to argue that the directional asymmetry of alpha represents early recognition and critical importance of behavioural lateralization in domesticated cattle when interacting with their human handlers.Domestic cattle possess lateralized cognitive processing of human handlers. This has been recently demonstrated in the preference for large groups of cattle to view a human closely within the predominantly left visual field. By contrast, the same stimulus viewed predominantly within the right visual field promotes a significantly greater frequency of dispersal from a standing position, including flight responses. The respective sets of behaviours correspond with the traditional terms of “near side” for the left side of cattle and horses, and the “off” or “far side” for the right side. These traditional terms of over 300 years usage in the literature communicate functional practicalities for handling livestock and the recognition of lateralized cognitive processing. In this review, the possibility of even earlier recognition and the significance of laterality in cattle-human interaction was argued, from the earliest representations of the letter "A", originally illustrated from nearly 4000 years before the present time as the head of an ox as viewed not from the front or from the right, but from the left (near) side. By extension, this knowledge of lateralization in cattle may represent the earliest written example of applied ethology—the study of the behaviour of animals under human management.