SHEEP. Little is known with certainty about the origin of domesticated sheep. The earlier writers assumed a hypothetical wild ancestor having a long tail and certain other characteristics that distinguish the majority of domesticated breeds from the existing wild species; but none of these characters is of real signifi cance, and the more probable view is that the ancestors of our modern sheep belonged to species that still survive.
Dr. J. U. Duerst, from evidence collected on the site of the City of Anau in Turkistan, believes that the urial (Ovis vignei) was domesticated there, and he considers that the earliest domesti cated European type (Ovis aries palustris) was directly derived from this stock. The latter animal, known as the turbary sheep, appeared in Europe in neolithic times and it survives, but little changed, in the Biindnerschaf or Nalperschaf of the Grisons. It is a small, slender limbed sheep, black faced, and with long, sharp edged and rather goat-like horns. In the Copper age a new breed
(Ovis aries studeri) with massive spiral horns, appeared in Europe, and Duerst has shown that this was almost certainly derived in part at least from the wild mouflon (Ovis musimon). In Sardinia, as has been known since the time of Pliny, the mouflon interbreeds freely with domesticated sheep. The bulk of our modern breeds are obviously much more closely related to the sheep of the Copper age than to the earlier turbary type ; while it thus seems likely that the mouflon played the major part and the urial a minor part in producing our farm flocks, it is by no means certain that other species, such as the argali (Ovis ammon) were not con cerned. Dr. Keller's theory, however, which derived the turbary sheep from the arui or udad (Ammotragus) of northern Africa has been shown to be quite untenable. (See also ARGALI, MOUF