One gets older and remembers Western movies with a certain nostalgia. Iconic images with cowboys, Indians (Native Americans), gunfighters, towns with muddy streets, ranches, cowboy hats and cattle everywhere. These elements were so common that it is difficult to think that one of them was not native to America.
The reality is that livestock did not exist on the American continent before the arrival of the Spanish, who brought this type of animals from Europe through the Canary Islands. A recent study further notes that livestock were also imported from Africa early in the colonization process, more than 100 years before their arrival was officially documented.
The records, both Portuguese and Spanish, refer to breeds from Andalusia, but do not mention the transportation of livestock from the African continent.
“Early studies concluded that a few hundred animals were brought in at the beginning of the 16th century, which were then raised locally in Hispaniola. It was deduced that, from there, it had spread throughout America,” explains Nicolas Delsol, from the Florida Museum of Natural History.
During his second expedition, in 1493, Columbus took the first cattle to the Caribbean, where they were used as farm animals and a source of food. This initiative was so successful that it ended up becoming a problem when wild cattle began to spread across Hispaniola.
The Spanish distributed livestock throughout the Caribbean, and by 1525 foreign herds were being raised in parts of Central and South America. Meanwhile, the Portuguese moved animals from mainland Europe and the Cape Verde Islands to present-day Brazil.
But researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History suspected the story was incomplete. In 1518, Emperor Charles V passed an edict legalizing the transportation of slaves directly from their home countries to America, a practice that began less than three years later.
And it turns out that, as Delsol and his team explain in a study published in the journal Scientific Reports, in the following decades, enslaved Africans would play a vital (and often unrecognized) role in the development of livestock farming, which "profoundly shaped the landscape and social systems throughout the American continent," he says.
“The first ranchers in Mexico were almost all of African descent,” says the researcher in a statement. “We know that groups like the Fulani, a West African ethnic group, formed pastoralist societies in which they lived in what could be described as a symbiosis with livestock. That's why we thought there was a good chance that the Spanish would bring cattle from the same region as the people they enslaved,” he adds.
The DNA of modern American cattle bears the signature of its European ancestry, but also reveals a history of hybridization with breeds from Africa and Asia. However, without archaeological data, it is not possible to determine exactly when these events took place.
The first records of African cattle in America date back to the 19th century, when the humpbacked zebu of Senegal and the N'Dama of the Gambia were moved to areas with similar environments on the other side of the Atlantic. Beginning around the same time and continuing into the 20th century, livestock domesticated in Southeast Asia for thousands of years were also imported from India.
Hybridization between these species gave rise to common breeds that still exist today, such as the Senepol of the Virgin Islands and the American Brahman common in the tropics. Delsol gathered 21 bones from various archaeological sites. Seven were excavated in Puerto Real, an ancient cattle town in Hispaniola established in 1503 and abandoned decades later due to rampant piracy in the region.
The remaining specimens correspond to 17th and 18th century sites in central Mexico, including settlements and convents in a long arc from Mexico City to the Yucatan Peninsula. After extracting DNA from bone material, he compared its genetic sequences with those of modern breeds from around the world.
As expected, most of the sequences shared a strong relationship with cattle from Europe, especially in the Puerto Real specimens. Six of the bones from Mexico also had sequences common in African cattle but, more importantly, are also found in breeds present in southern Europe.
“To complicate things, in Spain there are cattle similar to those in Africa due to exchanges that lasted centuries through the Strait of Gibraltar,” adds the expert. But one tooth found in Mexico City stood out from the rest. It had a short sequence virtually unknown anywhere else outside of Africa. The cow it came from probably lived in the late 17th century, delaying the introduction of African cattle by more than a century.
When analyzed over time, the bones also reveal a pattern of increasing genetic diversity. The oldest bones from Puerto Real and Xochimilco (a settlement south of Mexico City) all came from European strains, while those from later sites in Mexico appear to have descended from animals more common in the Iberian Peninsula and Africa.
