“The non-profit Rewilding Spain is introducing Przewalski’s horses and aurochs-lookalike Taurus cattle to the Spanish countryside in an attempt to fill the ecological niches left empty by the long-extinct European megafauna,” reports The Doomslayer.
Mongabay adds:
Some 30,000 years ago, Stone Age people decorated a cave, today known as Cueva de los Casares, in central Spain with pictures of mating humans (most famously), geometric shapes, and animals. The most popular carved animal is the wild horse.
Cueva de los Casares sports at least two dozen images of wild horses. Eventually, these Pleistocene-epoch horses vanished — likely slaughtered for food or domesticated. But some 10,000 years later, wild horses have again returned to central Spain — this time to help with out-of-control fires and bring economic opportunity to a struggling region.
In 2023, Rewilding Spain, apart of Rewilding Europe’s network, brought in the first 16 Przewalski’s horses (Equus ferus przewalskii) from France to the highlands of Spain’s Guadalajara province, one of the least populated parts of the country…
Today, the project has 35 Przewalski’s horses.
And it’s not the only species brought back by Rewilding Spain. The team also brought in Taurus cattle. Developed by the Taurus Project, these cattle are meant to be as similar as possible to the extinct aurochs (Bos primigenius) that once roamed much of Europe, Asia and North Africa.
Wikipedia describes the aurochs and its encounters with ancient humans:
The aurochs is an extinct species of bovine, considered to be the wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle. With a shoulder height of up to 71 inches in bulls and 61 inches in cows, it was one of the largest herbivores in the Holocene; it had massive elongated and broad horns that reached 31 inches in length.
The aurochs was part of the Pleistocene megafauna. It probably evolved in Asia and migrated west and north during warm interglacial periods. The oldest-known aurochs fossils date to the Middle Pleistocene. The species had an expansive range spanning from Western Europe and North Africa to the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. The distribution of the aurochs progressively contracted during the Holocene due to habitat loss and hunting, with the last known individual dying in the Jaktorów forest in Poland in 1627.
There is a long history of interaction between aurochs and humans, including archaic hominins like Neanderthals. The aurochs is depicted in Paleolithic cave paintings, Neolithic petroglyphs, Ancient Egyptian reliefs and Bronze Age figurines. It symbolised power, sexual potency and prowess in religions of the ancient Near East. Its horns were used in votive offerings, as trophies and drinking horns.
