From Aurochs to Ūruz to U

A cave painting of an Auroch, dating to 17,300 years ago, Lascaux, France. Image Source: Heraclitian Fire.

The core of civilization hinges on the domestication of animals, above all, the cow. According to geneticists, the source of all domestic cattle boils down to one prehistoric herd of 80 head of cattle in what is now Iran. In March 2012, DNA research from scientists from the CNRS and National Museum of Natural History in France, the University of Mainz in Germany, and UCL in the UK traced the domestication of this herd back to a period 10,500 years ago (Hat tip: i09). That herd engendered the total number of cows in the world today, approximately 1.3 billion, or roughly one bovine for every seven humans on earth.

Cave paintings of Aurochs, dating to 17,300 years ago, Lascaux, France. Image Source: Prof saxx via Wiki.

These cows were not the cows we know, but an ancestor of modern cows (Bos taurus and Bos indicus - the Zebu), called the Auroch (Bos primigenius, also known as "urus" and "wisent"). Evolving some 2 million years ago in India, they were much bigger, more aggressive and generally tougher animals than our modern cows; we would find their stature similar to that of the American Bison. There are some die hard nostalgics who believe that Aurochs still survive, tucked away in secluded Eastern European valleys (a Romanian video purportedly of modern Aurochs, also known as the Zimbru, here, admittedly shows massive animals on dainty legs, which look an awful lot like the cave paintings). The author of that video refers to yet another Millennial popular study which peculiarly brings prehistory right into the 21st century and states:

You’ll find a lot of things very different than what you’ve been taught. Two animals of the bovine family are claimed to be in existence in Romania; one is called BOUR and the other is ZIMBRU (alias AUROCH). The BOUR is the ancestor of cattle, not the AUROCH. The bour is a smaller animal, but has big horns and that’s where the confusion is. Etymologically, the word BOUR fits with BOS—meaning oxen in Greek and Latin. In addition, AUROCH does fit with TAURUS (meaning bull in Greek and Latin) but that word came about because bour (wild cattle) bulls were much bigger than the cow. Hence, TAUROS. The literal translation from Latin is “like a TAURO”, TAURO being the name of the Auroch. The confusion comes from the fact that Western scientists talk about only one animal, when in fact there are two.

Despite these popular musings, researchers insist that Aurochs are extinct. They claim that the last Auroch, a cow, died in Poland in 1627. These animals lived especially in northern climes, but generally covered Europe, Russia, North Africa, the Near and Middle East, Central Asia, India and Asia.

A cave painting of an Auroch, dating to 17,300 years ago, Lascaux, France. Image Source: Heraclitian Fire.

Palaeontologists view cave paintings as contemporary Stone Age historical records of Aurochs and hence know how they appeared. The DNA sequence of the Auroch was determined in 2010. Perhaps the current boom in genetic research explains why Ice Age creatures have lately enjoyed a vogue in Millennial culture.

The rune, Ūruz.

Given the tremendous importance of the Auroch, it is not surprising that early writing systems incorporated bovinely-inspired letters and pictograms. In northern Europe's Proto-Germanic and Old Norse languages, the rune which depicted an Auroch was Ūruz or Ur. In Old English, it was indicated by Ur or Yr. This letter became a predecessor of U or Y. The rune also means 'water' or 'rain.'

My impression is that this rune was incorporated into what is now the English word 'you' or 'þu.' In Old Norse, the word was 'þú,' which became 'du' in modern Germanic and Scandinavian languages. In Proto-Germanic, the word was þū and in Proto-Indo-European, it was túh.

Hence, the rune, which designated one of the most important animals with which humans have ever interacted, helped to point to our linguistic sense of the other, the creature outside the Self. Runes have modern-day, quasi-archaic occult meanings, which I won't cover here, but these magical connotations may play with another dimension of this lingustic question, this sense of duality, of the most basic distinction between inner and outer worlds.

Different words which were once used to indicate 'you' were soon replaced with one universal pronoun. Grammatically, 'thou' was once declined in English as follows, until all forms of 'thou' were replaced with 'you' in the late Middle Ages, partly because using 'thou' was considered overly familiar with one's superiors, or condescending toward one's equals:

Nominative singular: THOU
Nominative plural: YE
Objective singular: THEE
Objective plural: YOU

Although English now uses 'you' in all these cases, the modern colloquialism originally from the American South, 'you all,' or 'y'all,' restores a plural grammatical aspect to a now univerally-used 'you.' A colloquialism in the northern USA, Canada, and parts of the Commonwealth, 'youse,' functions in a similar way.

Today, the word 'you' ironically has transformed - some would say reverted - to 'u' in strangely runic Intenet slang and text messaging. Maybe the Ice Age is indeed alive and well on our gadgets and on the Internet.

Image Source: David Levene for the Guardian.

NOTES FOR READERS OF MY POSTS.
If you're not reading this post on Histories of Things to Come, the content may have been scraped and republished without attribution or the original author's permission. Please let me know by following this link and leaving me a comment. Thank you.