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The word 'zebu' entered European languages through French in the mid-eighteenth century, most likely borrowed from a Tigrinya or Amharic word for cattle at around the time the first live specimens were brought to the Paris Exposition of 1752. French naturalists recorded the term as 'zébu' to describe the distinctive humped cattle (Bos taurus indicus) that Ethiopian and East African pastoralists had herded for millennia. The precise chain of transmission is debated — some etymologists trace it through an intermediate Arabic term, others point to direct contact with Abyssinian traders — but the Ethiopian origin of both word and animal is well-established in zooarchaeological literature.

Zebu cattle (also called Bos indicus) diverged from European taurine cattle (Bos taurus) roughly 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, with domestication occurring independently in both South Asia and the Horn of Africa. The African zebu lineage — marked by its pronounced thoracic hump of fat and muscle, pendulous dewlap, and large floppy ears — was herded by highland and lowland Ethiopian pastoralists who developed sophisticated husbandry practices over thousands of years. The hump is not fat storage in the camel sense; it is a thermoregulatory muscle mass that allows zebu to maintain core temperature in intense tropical heat, making the animal uniquely suited to environments that defeat European cattle breeds.

The zebu's global dispersal followed several routes. From the Horn of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, Arab and Persian maritime traders carried humped cattle along the Swahili Coast and across the Indian Ocean as early as the first millennium BCE. Portuguese colonizers introduced African zebu lineages to Brazil in the sixteenth century, where they were crossed with taurine breeds to create the Nelore — now the dominant beef cattle of South America. Today Brazil holds the largest zebu population on Earth, some 170 million animals, the majority descended from stock originally developed by Ethiopian and Eritrean herders whose names history has not preserved.

When Buffon and other French naturalists introduced the term 'zébu' to scientific literature in the 1750s, they were naming an animal already familiar to much of the tropical world under a dozen other names: Boran, Zenga, Sanga, Gir, Kankrej. The French term's success was partly accidental — it entered the Linnaean taxonomic tradition at a formative moment and became the default scientific shorthand. Today 'zebu' appears in the scientific literature of every country that raises humped cattle, and the Amharic-adjacent syllables of that original highland word now classify roughly 75 percent of the world's cattle by subspecies, even if the herdspeople who first shaped those animals are rarely mentioned in the footnotes.