Americas ’ first cowboys were enslaved Africans, ancient cow DNA suggests

Think “cowboy,” and you might picture John Wayne riding herd across the U.S. West. But the first cowboys lived in Mexico and the Caribbean, and most of them were Black . That’s the conclusion of a recent analysis of DNA from 400-year-old cow bones excavated on the island of Hispaniola and at sites in Mexico. The work, published in Scientific Reports , also provides evidence that African cattle made it to the Americas at least a century earlier than historians realized. The timing of these African imports—to the early 1600s—suggests the growth of cattle herds may have been connected to the slave trade, says study author Nicolas Delsol, an archaeozoologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “It changes the whole perspective on the mythical figure of the cowboy, which has been whitewashed over the 20th century.” The first cattle in the Americas came from Spain, brought by Christopher Columbus to the island of Hispaniola on his second voyage in 1493. More came in subsequent voyages in the early 1500s. The vast herds that later spread across the Americas, historians have assumed, descended from this small founding population of about 500 cows. To understand the spread of cattle, Delsol scoured museum collections for cattle bones from postcontact Hispaniola and Mexico. The authors compared genetic signatures in the DNA from 21 cows found at early Spanish sites in Mexico and Haiti to known European and African breeds....
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news