History of the domestic sheep exact line of descent between domestic sheep and their wild ancestors is unclear. The most common hypothesis states that "Ovis aries" is descended from the Asiatic ("O. orientalis") species of mouflon. A few breeds of sheep, such as the Castlemilk Moorit from Scotland, were formed through crossbreeding with wild European mouflon. The urial ("O. vignei") was once thought to have been a forebear of domestic sheep, as they occasionally interbreed with mouflon in the Iranian part of their range. However, the urial, argali ("O. ammon"), and snow sheep ("O. nivicola") have a different number of chromosomes than other Ovis species,
European mouflon to about 20,000 in 1967. At that time there were 7,000 in Germany, over 2,000 in Austria, and 2,000 in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In the Bavarian Forest, mouflon were naturalised from 1971 to 1974 on the southern side of the forest, with the aid of the Wittelsbach Compensation Fund. At times, the population grew to almost 100 animals. By early 2008, it fell again due to tourism, hunting and the newly released lynx leaving just over 30 mouflon in the area of the Geisskopf. In January 1969 in Luxembourg, several mouflon from the Grand Ducal park at Imbringen in the