Talk:Sanga cattle

.... a few hundred years ....

Hi. Could someone with access to the source see if it is possible to be more precise where it says "bloodlines of taurine and zebu cattle were introduced only within the last few hundreds years" A "few hundred years" is very little in terms of spread across the present range of the sanga and also would be a period paralell to the involvement of Europeans in the exchnege of species into and from Africa. Thanks, Rui ''Gabriel'' Correia (talk) 07:31, 15 June 2015 (UTC)

Reclassified as stub

The WikiProject classification for Sanga cattle was Start-class. It has been reclassified as Stub-class per request.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  16:11, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

section on independent domestication in Africa

Current genetic data do not support the hypothesis that cattle were independently domesticated in Africa. The references cited in this section are relatively old, and the consensus is now that cattle were domesticated in southwest Asia and brought to Africa (with later introgression with African aurochs). See https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eva.12674, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/age.12974, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12915-021-01206-x, etc.

Would anyone else like to work on updating this section? I can revise over the next few months but would be happy to leave this to someone else. Ninafundisha (talk) 16:00, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

These are all WP:PRIMARY. Has this become the prevailing opinion WP:SECONDARY? Invasive Spices (talk) 20:33, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

There's not much discussion of this topic outside of the academic literature at all, really. Here is a paper, though, that provides a very good overview - it's from an archaeologist and a geneticist, and reviews some of the earlier work heavily cited in the paragraph about independent domestication here. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10437-013-9131-6 Ninafundisha (talk) 22:41, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Anything outside the academic literature would be much less interesting. The review you provide would be appropriate but there is a problem. The only mention of Sanga does not support your position. Grigson contended that ancient African domestic cattle are so distinct from both taurine and indicine cattle that they could derive from a separate domestication of the northern African aurochs subspecies In deed it supports the opposite. Invasive Spices (talk) 21:35, 5 February 2023 (UTC)

I believe that you're misreading this paper. The authors are reviewing previous work from Grigson and other archaeologists, who did indeed believe that there may have been a separate domestication event in Africa. Those papers are largely from the 1990s, before we had cattle genetics to really clarify the domestication question. Stock and Gifford-Gonzalez then go on to review where the field stands now (well, relatively recently - 2013), with new insight from genetic data. The genetic data do not completely rule out the possibility that taurine cattle were separately domesticated in Africa, but the genetic data do overall suggest that this wasn't actually the case ("These data tend to support a scenario of only one domestication of B. taurus and subsequent intercontinental exchange over several millennia, as suggested in earlier studies."). The newer genetic data that I copied links for above continues to support the idea that taurine cattle were not domesticated separately in Africa, but rather that domesticated taurine cattle were brought in Africa from southwest Asia, and then interbred with wild aurochs. Ninafundisha (talk) 17:13, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes that text does support that. The next question is does this pertain to Sanga or is there an other article for this text? I agree on this basis we should strike any text in this article saying there are two domestication events. However we shouldn't then replace it with any new text because this review supports a statement about African cattle as a whole. Is there an article about African cattle that would be appropriate for this? Invasive Spices (talk) 22:44, 6 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure if there is discussion somewhere else on Wikipedia about the origins of African cattle. Perhaps there should be, if not! I just feel strongly that the extended discussion on this page about independent domestication should be shortened dramatically, to correct the outdated information presented there. Ninafundisha (talk) 15:24, 8 February 2023 (UTC)

This all makes sense now. I have looked and there is nothing like African cattle. I think African cattle should be a redirect here and the (corrected) text should in deed be here. Clearly I am not the editor to do that however. Invasive Spices (talk) 20:06, 8 February 2023 (UTC)