User talk:Macraig

January 2010

Welcome to Wikipedia. Everyone is welcome to make constructive contributions to Wikipedia, but at least one of your recent edits, such as the one you made to Aurochs, did not appear to be constructive and has been automatically reverted by ClueBot.

• Please use the sandbox for any test edits you would like to make, and take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Note that human editors do monitor recent changes to Wikipedia articles, and administrators have the ability to block users from editing if they repeatedly engage in vandalism.
• Cluebot produces very few false positives, but it does happen. If you believe the change you made should not have been detected as unconstructive, please report it here, remove this warning from your talk page, and then make the edit again.
• The following is the log entry regarding this warning: Aurochs was changed by Macraig (u) (t) deleting 25013 characters on 2010-01-21T06:21:52+00:00 . Thank you. ClueBot (talk) 06:21, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did with this edit to the page Aurochs. Such edits constitute vandalism and are reverted. Please do not continue to make unconstructive edits to pages; use the sandbox for testing. Thank you. Singlish Speªker ^♪♫ 06:24, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

To Singlish_speaker and whomever it may concern: I did not intend to delete the entire page, rather it seems to have been caused by a system failure in the middle of the process in a way I could not have predicted. What follows is my actual attempted edit of the Aurochs page in question, and I would appreciate it if someone would either apply the edit themselves or free me of my chains so that I may finish what I started:

Subspecies

There are a total of three recognized subspecies of aurochs. Only the Eurasian subspcies survived until recent times.

• The Eurasian subspecies (Bos primigenius primigenius) once ranged across the steppes and taigas of Europe, Siberia, and Central Asia. It is one of the famous Pleistocene megafaunas, and has declined in numbers along with other megafauna species by the end of Pleistocene. The Eurasian aurochs were domesticated into modern cattle breeds at around 6th millenium BC. Aurochs were still common in Europe by the time of the Roman Empire, when they were widely popular as a battle beast in Roman arenas, and excessive hunting began and continued until it was nearly extinct. By the 13th century, aurochs existed only in low numbers in Eastern Europe, and hunting of aurochs became a privilege of nobles, and later royal households. The decreased hunting did not save the aurochs from extinction, as its numbers were already too low to survive for long. The last recorded live aurochs, a female, died in 1627 in the Jaktorów Forest, Poland from natural causes.

• The Indian subspecies (Bos primigenius namadicus) once lived in the hot and dry areas of India and the Middle East. It is the first subspecies of the aurochs to appear, at 2 million years ago, and from it descends the Eurasian Aurochs and the North African Aurochs. The Indian Aurochs became extinct in 9000 BC, and before that the remaining population was domesticated into the zebu. The zebu is the primary breed of cattle used in dry areas, due to its resistance to drought, which it got from the desert-living Indian aurochs.

• The North African subspecies (Bos primigenius mauretanicus) once lived in the woodland and shrubland of North Africa. It is descended from the Indian Aurochs, which migrated from the Middle East. It is unknown when the North African Aurochs became extinct, but it is known that its extinction was due to the desertification of North Africa as the Sahara Desert expanded. Prior to its extinction the Ancient Egyptians domesticated the North African Aurochs into Egyptian cattle, which was the primary breed of cattle in the Mediterranean region until the introduction of zebu from India, which slowly replaced Egyptian cattle in the region.