Domestication: From Horses to Gerbils – How Animals Became Our Allies

In this episode of Wildly Curious (formerly For the Love of Nature), co-hosts Katy Reiss and Laura Fawks Lapole dive into the fascinating history of animal domestication. From the world-changing domestication of horses to the quirky arrival of gerbils in homes, they explore why and how humans have cultivated relationships with animals for millennia. Learn about the roles of camels, cats, and even gerbils in human history, and uncover surprising facts about the mutual benefits of domestication. Whether for companionship, transportation, or survival, the stories of these animals will leave you with a newfound appreciation for the creatures we share our lives with.

Perfect for nature lovers, science enthusiasts, and anyone curious about the relationships between humans and animals. Join Katy and Laura for a humorous and insightful look into how these animals have shaped human history.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to For the Love of Nature, a podcast where we tell you everything you need to know about nature and probably more than you wanted to know. I'm Laura.
And I'm Katie. And today we're gonna be talking about domestication. I think you have a wild animal to say.
It sounds like I do. Hold on, let me switch this over so we can hear. All right, hold on, you little knucklehead.
Well, while Katie's doing that, guys, instead of Nature News Today, we wanted to finally let you hear the long-promised, what is this device called again, Katie?
It's called a plant wave. So if you guys remember way back, I've literally been waiting for this thing. Lucas, I've literally been waiting for this thing for over a year.
And hey, I've been waiting for this thing for over a year. It was a, what's it called? Kickstarter, I believe.
No, or did I just buy it straight from it?
I can't remember. It's been so long. You've been promised it for months.
No, a year, like a year. Yeah, it was definitely a year ago that I placed the order. So I've been waiting for literally a year for this thing.
So what it does is it picks up on the tiny electrical currents within plants, and then it assigns based upon those waves, it assigns musical notes to the different, you know, wavelengths, and then it plays music through it. So this is one of my houseplants.
So, it's kind of set up like a synthesizer too, so you can play and choose different sound effects based on what, I don't know, what you're in the mood for. So that one's Emerald Journey. Let's see here.
It's weird that it's doing it like that's the pulses that's going to the plant right now.
Yeah.
Here's Jungle Brook.
I mean that's just a song. So, so is it really that each wave is assigned a different note or that as the waves come it's playing the song?
No, no, it is literally that they are each assigned a different note.
Cause it's so...
Perfect. Yeah.
Yeah, how, what?
This is Sound Bath.
It's too, it's too mind blowing.
Wait, here's Be Happy. This should be good.
Cause you can hear like every once in a while depending on the plant too cause some plants don't sound quite as nice as others.
Thank you for watching. See you next time.
Yeah, this plant's very mysterious.
Yeah. And it definitely changes. Let me grab the bamboo one then.
So then this one, so it's the little box, and then you have to connect it to your phone or to a speaker.
So now, this is gonna switch over from... Let's see, where can I put this one?
That's a bamboo now.
So you can hear it like a definite difference.
Uh-huh.
So let's go back to be happy. Happy.
I mean, yeah, very much later. I feel like if this is at all like telling you anything about your plants is that you need to take better care of your first plant. It's not happy.
But yeah, we've been taking it around and messing with it. We had one plant at work that we couldn't get to work, and we were like convinced it was dead. But it wasn't, we finally got it to work.
But yeah, so that was pretty cool. I mean, it is fun. And so, like, of course, because how else are you going to make your money besides just buying the device itself?
So there's a subscription to it, and whenever you buy into the subscription part of it, you can also hook it up to, like, a soundboard and everything. And then you yourself can modify and assign the different note stuff, too. So.
Very cool.
Well, today, guys, we are not going to be talking about plants. We are actually instead going to be talking about animals, and we're going to be talking about animal domestication and about how humans have domesticated animals throughout history for various reasons. And I'm really excited to talk about this.
I've actually been talking about it all week with people because I think it's so fascinating because we're going to be kind of covering the history of certain species' domestication, and then why did humans bother doing it at all?
I'm glad you're excited. This one was interesting for me. I think you're a little bit more pumped about it than what I am.
My two are interesting. Well, technically, my first one you stole, and because I was going to talk about ferrets.
I didn't steal it. I talked about ferrets last episode. I didn't have them in this episode.
You just did such a good job.
I'm sorry.
That it covered.
We're electricians.
Yeah, I just covered the cool stuff to talk about. Alrighty, do you want to go ahead and go first on this one? Because I think I went first last time.
I'm excited.
So, horses is my first one.
I saw that one coming, yeah?
Both my species are very Lara species. I was like, absolutely horses. And I was really fascinated, not that I don't know a ton about horses, but I don't know much about their domestication history.
Yes.
And actually, neither do most people, or scientists until very recently. So let me start off by saying that I am not exaggerating when I say that the domestication of the horse changed the course of human history.
Oh, for sure.
Probably, I would venture to say beyond any other species, it affected transportation, communication, trading, warfare. And according to Nigel Tallis from the British Museum, he says, the history of the horse is the history of civilization itself.
I mean, that makes sense.
It allowed civilization to expand.
Yeah.
So, with that lofty golden mind, let me tell you a little bit about the history of the domestication of the horse. So, the wild ancestor was Equus Ferris, which is now extinct. But that species originated in Eastern Eurasia 160,000 years ago.
So, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, not that long ago. Yeah, it's really not that long ago. So, humans at least observed horses and likely hunted them for food as far back as 20,000 years ago as evidence in the Lescaux cave paintings.
I think that's how you say it. It's French, I'm terrible. But you know that famous, I mean, if you think about cave paintings, that's what you're picturing, it's that famous cave.
And there's pictures, lots of pictures of horses in there. But it took until the last decade for geneticists and archaeologists teaming up to find out where the domestic horse originated, because there's all these theories that we've had throughout time. But until we could put together the genetics and stuff, didn't have an answer.
So now we think it was about 4,200 years ago. So again, not that long.
Considering, yeah.
Yeah, considering. And especially, probably between the two of us, we might be talking about some other species that were domesticated a lot longer than that. But the horse 4,200 years ago, where on the steps of the Black Sea region, and steps as in the habitat?
Yeah. Two P's.
Not the steps leading to the Black Sea. So that's modern day Russia and Eastern Europe. So horses, the reason why it's so hard to determine where they came from is that horses have interbred with wild populations this entire time.
So looking at genetics, it's very like jumping all around. Yeah. And they've been traded between people and between continents.
So pinning that down was pretty hard.
Yeah, because you would have to know the history of human movement, which is debated. Yeah, which is debated all the time anyway.
Yeah. So, what they think is that people started selecting horses that had genes associated with being more docile, having higher endurance, having more stress resilience, and having a stronger backbone, which makes sense because of riding.
It just also is weird to me that homo sapiens have been around for how long, and no one thought before 4,200 years ago to be like, I could ride that. You know what I mean?
I mean, think about our episode, right? Could you ride that?
It's a horse.
They're not wondering that since the very beginning. If Lara would have started coming from like, climbed down out of a tree and had to walk on land, her immediate thought would be, what am I climbing on?
Yeah, what can I ride to make this easier? Horse.
I mean, remember when we were at the zoo and the tiny little marmosets were riding around on the, on the, on the sake monkeys?
Yes. Or no, was it the, oh, no, no. Cause then the sake's had the pet iguanas.
That's what it was.
Right, right. It was a weird thing. But I mean, those marmosets were like, weird mounts.
I can make my life so much easier if I just ride something.
But not all scientists agree with this conclusion because the DNA tells different stories, depending on what you look at. So for, not to get too deep in here, but if you look at mitochondrial DNA, that's the stuff you get from your mom. That is different than DNA from your Y chromosome, which you get from a dad if you're a boy.
So maternal versus paternal lineages. And those things tell very different stories about domestication, probably because way more females were involved in the process, and not as many stallions. Which again, makes sense.
Stallions are much harder to control. You only need one stallion for a whole bunch of mares. So just depending on the DNA you're looking at tells you some different things.
They also think there was probably more than one event. So it's not like one tribe was like, we are domesticating horses, and that was that. It probably happened a couple of different times.
Suddenly it all clicked. Homo sapiens across the world, huh?
We just-
And they also, here's what I also think is cool, not just the genetics, but the archeological evidence helps to pinpoint that, because recently they've been able to find horse teeth that show indications of wear from a bridle.
Oh, interesting.
Around the same time period. So they're like, aha.
But also, could you imagine not, okay, being a tribe that doesn't ride horses does not have that concept, and then suddenly you see somebody going past you riding a horse, an animal that you've seen so often, and suddenly you're like, why didn't I think of that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to think of what the equivalent of that would be like for us. I guess like a deer, like all of a sudden someone rides by on a deer, and we're like, dude, why didn't we think how to do that?
Yeah, we should have been doing this a long time ago. Jumped on a horse.
Yeah, well, I mean, the reason why it's the history of civilization is because every civilization that then domesticated the horse came out on top. So, get an extra couple of legs.
So, with all of that, with that event or that time period happening, the modern domestic horse, so what basically they developed in a very short time, replaced all local populations of wild horses within about 500 years. Which is crazy. Usually domestication takes way longer than that to replace their wild counterparts.
This was just a wave of horses. Everyone was like, screw the wild ones, we're all domesticating them, and they took over. And the reason they know most of this stuff is because there's something called the Pegasus Project, which is putting together the entire picture of horse domestication.
Including the introduction of them to North and South America, which still hasn't really been figured out, because that process of expansion and breeding is still highly debated. So yes, there's some answers, but not a ton. There's still a lot more to be discovered.
Why did people domesticate horses? I mean, obviously, you want to ride it. You want to carry stuff.
So they were used to pull wheeled vehicles, and they can be ridden very fast and very far, because up until then, they had already domesticated cattle, but cows aren't super fast. So not that they can't book it when they want to, but it's very different than a horse. Yeah.
They were used in war. They were used for hunting. They were used in general transportation.
And this actually affected the spread of language and culture, especially because it kind of came hand in hand with the spoked wheel for like a chariot. And so that all came around probably because somebody who was riding a horse was like...
Can I make this even faster?
It can carry more if I don't ride it myself. So that's why they were first used, which I thought was fascinating. I would have thought that maybe they would have been used for farming at first, but apparently no.
It was for transportation and riding. And then eventually they were used for farming and work horses, and then sports, and then just companionship. And today there are around 200 breeds of domestic horse.
And man, I've looked this up before, but there are only a few wild species left today. Truly wild, right, because mustangs are not considered truly wild. They're feral.
So there's only a couple of species left. So yeah, the domestic horse changed civilization and took over the world.
Quite literally. Well, I'm glad that you started off with a horse because my first pick is just the derpier version of your animal.
A donkey?
No. Camel.
You're right, it is a derpy version of a horse because it's pretty similar.
It is. So for a lot of the similar reasons too. So, quick natural history of the camel.
They are an ungulate, which just means hoofed mammal. And there are two species, now there are two species of camel. I'm gonna butcher these, but the Bactrian, is that how you say it?
Yep. And then the Drondary, but it's Camulus Bactrinus and Camulus Drondarius. My best guess there.
My best guess. But the easiest way to tell the difference between the two of these, is the Drondary camel has one hump, while the Bactrian camel has two humps. Camels store fat in these humps, which is typically what they're most known for, which later can be used as an energy source.
The Bactrian camel, can you hear Luke?
The Bactrian camel is 10 to 11 and a half feet long, five-
They're freaking huge.
They are big.
I remember seeing one in person at a zoo, and I was like, whoa!
Yeah, it's deceptive, and five to six feet tall at its shoulder, and weighs 900 to 1,100 pounds. Meanwhile, the Drondary camel is seven to 11 feet long, but they're just like lankier. They're lankier, just because of the climates.
And that's what I'm gonna talk about next. The average life expectancy of the camel is 40 to 50 years. So the Bactrian camels are native to the Gobi deserts in China, and the Bactrian steppes, again, ecosystem, not the acro steppes, Again, steppes, yeah.
Of Mongolia. Which again, that's why they're like chunkier, because it's a lot colder there.
Which I think is so funny, because everyone always thinks camels in deserts, but no.
Yeah, it's a desert. Yeah, it's a desert, but. Yeah.
And it is a desert. It's just a very freaking cold desert. Domesticated dromedary camels are found throughout the desert areas in North Africa and the Middle East.
A feral population of dromedary camels do live in Australia. And fun little history fact, evolution-wise, camelids as a whole, which include alpacas and llamas too, originated in North America.
I remember finding that out, and we were both like, what?
Yeah, we probably stopped everything we were doing at work and spent at least a solid hour. Because we were like, there's no way camels are originally from North America. No, there definitely are.
And even here in Texas, there's a national monument that you can visit in Waco. It's very small. It is in the national park system.
Very, very tiny, but it is pretty neat. And I have pictures, we'll have to post those. But there's camel fossils there.
There's mammoth, and then also camel fossils. So it's pretty cool. So they moved from North America, spread out over Russia, and then also at the same time, down to South America.
Again, similar to the horse, it started not as what we think of the typical camel. It was much smaller.
Yes, yes. And we have horses here in North America that went extinct way before domestic use never happened.
So living in deserts, camels are herbivores eating grass, grains, wheat, and oats. They will spend their days searching for food and grazing. They have tough but flexible lips, which enable them to break off and eat high-notes.
It's the lips that make them the derpiest.
No, I know, but just the description too. Tough yet flexible lips.
They are.
The most desirable traits of lips.
Tough yet flexible. Flexible. I mean.
So this allows them to eat vegetation that would otherwise be uneditable to some other features. Like, a lot of desert plants have thorns and other ways to protect themselves so that they're not eaten, and camels don't care, and they just eat them anyway. They also have other features that allow them to survive in the desert, such as double rows of extra long eyelashes that help keep sand out of their eyes, and they are also able to close their nostrils to keep sand out.
Camels are social animals that live in groups called herds, and a her typically will consist of an adult male, females, and their young. Camels, also an interesting fact, that they have a very sophisticated communication system which has very many different moans and loud bellows. If you've ever heard a camel...
Oh yeah, it's gross.
It's gross, but it's also like the dumbest thing, one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. Mothers and their newborns will hum to each other. They blow in each other's faces as a friendly way to greet one another.
Which, again...
Horses do that.
But I also, okay, but horses, I have some class. I feel like if camels were to do it, it would just be like a, pff, naughty. Yeah, just, ugh, so gross.
Anyway, but they are very attuned to each other's body language, like indicating alertness because they are a very close-knit social group. So all of that, though, plays into the domestication. So around 90% of the world's camels currently are dromedary camels, also known as the Arabian camel.
All existing dromedary camels are domesticated. Meanwhile, there are two types of Bactrian camels, wild and domesticated. So very similar to horses.
Camels originated, like I said, in North America and eventually spread from Baragena to Asia. And here, camels survived in the old world, and eventually humans domesticated them and spread them globally. What we note today as like the typical camel.
And they got domesticated in where they are now?
Kind of. It started in Asia, and then it went out from there. So scientists believe that the original camels here in North America were wiped out by indigenous people some 10,000, 12,000 years ago.
So when humans first domesticated camels is debated, just like the horses, but the first domesticated dromedaries have been seen in Southern Arabia around 3000 BCE or as late as 1000 BCE.
And- Okay, so that's actually, so that's like 5,000 years ago. So a little before the horse.
Yeah, just before. Which again, like, I don't know why they thought, let's ride a camel, but not a horse. Maybe his horse was just not too fast to catch.
Yeah. I mean, camels are just stupid. The bacteria in camels in Central Asia, though, were domesticated, I think, around 2500 BCE, and I ran.
So why did people originally domesticate them? Meat, milk, and their ability to travel long distances in harsh conditions, taking up very little food and water during the day. And also things like how they communicate, that the fact that they like to be social.
So you can take a bunch of them in like a caravan style, and they're very alert, and they communicate constantly. And so it's almost like, I mean, just having eyes and ears everywhere. Like horses are very alert, but because camels communicate almost constantly from what I was finding, just very, very alert.
Yeah, I bet they are a little more vocal than horses, at least, like, as a family unit. To be able to understand what's going on.
Yeah, and each camel can carry about 200 extra pounds too. And they can carry that load more than 20 miles in a day. So that is, yeah, quite a bit.
So desert tribes and Mongolia nomads have also used camel hair for tents, for their yurts, clothing, bedding, and a variety of other things. Camels have outer guard hairs, and soft inner down, and the fibers are sorted by color and age of the animal. Very similar to alpaca and llamas, yeah.
The guard hairs can be felted and used for waterproof coats for the herdsmen, while the softer hair is used for premium and finer goods.
That makes sense. I've seen when I took care of camels, like, they would peel.
Yeah.
Like in a sheet.
Yes.
At the end of the winter.
Yeah.
So that makes sense that it's like filled.
Yeah. So the fiber can be spun for weaving, used and made into different yurs. Again, just like llamas and alpacas.
I think alpacas, I don't know if, do they use llama?
I'm sure somebody uses llama. I'm sure, I'm sure.
So anyway, back to going their ability to travel long distances. Camels were primarily used in the military, which again, just what a derpy animal.
Military camels.
Right? They don't need a lot of food or water, again carry large loads for long distances, perfect for moving goods. So the military forces have used camel calvaries in wars throughout Africa, the Middle East, and India.
Though as of July 2012, in India, their main military planned the replacement of camels with ATVs. So 2012. That's whenever they just now started, like maybe we can use something a little more efficient.
The first documented use of camel calvaries occurred in the Battle of Khar Khar in 853 BC.
Cool.
So armies have also used camels as freight animals instead of horses and mules, again because of their ability to not need to eat and drink as much. An example a little bit closer to home, which I did not know any of this, was the United States Army established a US camel corpse in California in the 19th century. You can still see some of the stables at this arsenal in California, but today it serves as a historical museum.
Though the use of camels was seen as a success, the onset of the Civil War in 1861 saw the end of the camel corpse. Texas became part of the Confederacy, and most of the camels were left to wander away into the desert. So what happened to these wild Texas camels?
Feral.
Well, some sources say three of them were caught in Arkansas by Union forces, and in 1863, they were sold at an Iowa auction. Others found their way down to Mexico. A few were used by the Confederate Post Office Department.
One camel was reportedly pushed off a cliff by a Confederate soldier.
Why?
It's a camel off a cliff. Another, nicknamed Old Douglas, became the property of the 43rd Mississippi Infantry, was reportedly shot and killed during the Siege of Fixburg, then buried nearby. Why?
Don't know. But the majority of the camels were auctioned off to a guy who used them to move supplies from Laredo, Texas to Mexico City. So, as you can see, people have used domesticated camels, I mean, longer, a little bit longer, around the same time as a horse for a variety of purposes based upon their populations for quite some time.
But in conclusion, I am all in favor of bringing back camels for the use in the Postal Service.
I mean, yeah. For sure, at this point, too, how much different can it be?
Yeah. Right?
It's been taking a long time to get things.
So might as well start bringing, let's bring back the camel.
I mean, as derpy as camels are, and as much as I rag on them, they are like the ultimate endurance animal.
They are. They're great. Yeah.
Like if I needed to choose something that was going to last me, and I was like efficient, and I didn't need to carry a lot of food, like.
Because horses need a lot of food and water. And again, that's why a lot of them use camels, because they don't need to find food. They don't need to find water.
You can use all that food and water for yourself as people, and they are fine without it.
I rode a camel once, and it was like being in a boat.
It was.
It was very lurching. Yeah. Not as smooth as a horse.
No, definitely not. Cool.
Well, my next one, and the one that I'm most excited about and that I have talked about multiple times this past week is cats, because of course I'm going to talk about the domestication of cats.
Of course you are.
Okay, so cats. Let's start off with saying that we're talking about domestication here, and the typical way is, of course, that humans domesticate an animal. But DNA evidence shows that cats domesticated themselves, because of course.
Because I was going to say, one, can you imagine if they didn't domesticate themselves, the first idiot who would try to domesticate a cat is in for a killing.
Anyone who's ever tried to put a cat on a leash that didn't want to be on a leash.
Or flea medicine or anything that a cat.
Anything you don't want to do.
Yeah, it's impossible.
But yeah, literal DNA evidence shows that they did it themselves. Which I just love so much. So this is straight from an article.
So I'm just gonna read a word for it because they did it so well. Most cats are not truly domesticated at all. This is defined as breeding, care, and reproduction being totally controlled by humans, producing a reproductively isolated population.
And so this can only really apply to pedigreed pet cats. Not cats as a whole. So really, they're not even domesticated, but I'm including them in here.
Why were humans not responsible for this? Because cats are a terrible candidate for domestication.
They are.
Not even for their personality, but for the fact that if you think about it, everything that we've ever domesticated, for the most part, are either herd or pack animals. They like to be around each other. They like to be around people.
How's this say, or around anyone?
They're used to being packed into places densely, which makes them easier to breed. Everything about being a herd and a pack animal is just better for domestication. And cats are not.
They're solitary. They're also obligate carnivores, which not even dogs are. You can feed a dog some other things.
Cats, nope, me only, although, I mean, definitely they will eat other things. My cat will kill for Doritos.
Your cat is an exception, though. Your cat's name...
I sound like a lot of cats, though, like weird stuff. I have a friend's cat that likes pop tarts, like...
I mean, to be fair.
So, terrible for that, but what they had going for them was that cats do possess what humans consider cute features, which is scientific. It elicits nurturing in humans because they've got big eyes, short faces, like their features are like human baby features a little bit. And so people were like, they can stick around.
I was just going to say, I figured it was because like humans have like internal need to control everything, like the world around them, and cats we can't control.
And so year after year, cats, it's they're like endearingly sassy.
Yes.
So at some point, the timeline was this again has been a very recent discovery. We now know that cats were domesticated at least 9,500 years ago. And by domestication, we mean very loosely using that term.
Really, it's just cohabitation is what we should be calling it. They were cohabiting as long as 9,500 years ago, because they found a man buried next to his cat. And we know it was intentional.
They were facing the same direction, like towards the West. The cat was wrapped.
I thought you were going to say there were cat claw marks all on the inside of it.
On the skeleton? This was in Cyprus, which is an island that has no native cats. So we know that they brought the cat there.
So at least some sign of, at least that guy had figured out how to bring cats into the picture. Unfortunately, that cat and that man came from the coast, which was also showing domestication evidence in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, which lines up with the DNA evidence. So cats' domestication started in the Middle East in Mesopotamia, which is also the time that the house mouse showed up.
And this is not a coincidence. So archaeological evidence also shows a mutual relationship between cats and people around 5,500 BC in China. So probably a separate event, but not necessarily.
So there are two major lineages of the domestic cat.
And the domestic cat comes from Phyllis sylvestris libica, which is the African or also known as the Southwest Asian wild cat. So they know that at least some of the domestic cats came from ancestors originating in Southwest Asia that then came into Europe around 4,400 BC. Those ones were hanging around in Mesopotamia.
The house mouse had just become a new species because people had just started storing grain. That was when we started doing that. So we started storing grain, mice started showing up, and then the cats were like, if we hang out around farms, we get fed.
And so it was a mutually beneficial relationship between us and cats. Humans were like, okay, cool, we'll kill the mice. And the cats were like, okay, cool, we'll stick around and eat some.
Dogs and ferrets were both domesticated by that time and did a better job of catching rodents. So that's likely why humans didn't put any effort into domesticating the cat because it wasn't worth it.
No, they weren't that good. No, yeah.
They weren't that good. And the pay, like it was too high of a cost.
Because it's a cat.
Yeah. And then they know that cats were domesticated in that area too because they found a statue in Israel from 3,700 years ago. So then the other lineage of domestic cats comes more from Africa, and that is from Egypt that then spread into the Mediterranean and the old world.
And that happened around 1500 BC. So all from the same African wild cat, but kind of came into Europe from two different directions. Egypt, of course, a lot of people are familiar with the Egyptians and their love of cats.
They showed up in Egyptian art in 3600 BC, which is absolutely the most clear evidence. Up until this point, everything's like, okay, there's cats and art. Okay, there's one dude buried next to his cat.
That doesn't show anything. But for sure, by 3600 BC, cats were domesticated because Egyptians show art of them on leashes, being fed, in harness, things like clearly things that you do with a domestic animal.
But it's also funny that they, well, because they worshiped them, right?
Yes. So a little bit later than that. So I guess before then, they were just like, these are awesome.
And then a couple hundred years later, they were like, actually, they're god. Which I mean, yes.
They act like they are.
So that totally makes sense. They jumped to that conclusion. So in 2900 years ago, the goddess Bastet, the cat goddess, came into fashion.
And Egyptians were breeding cats en masse for sacrifice to Bastet. They were breeding cats not for any other, not for anything, just to sacrifice. You can find thousands of cat mummies.
Which is weird that you would sacrifice a cat to a cat god.
To a cat, yeah, I guess she needs like an undead if she's in another realm.
This is like the mummy, what was it, the mummy two? They needed her, like the-
Oh yeah, in the first one, the cat-
Brandon Frazier? Yeah, but then in the second one, they needed to sacrifice, the dead guy needed a human to then become human himself. Or is that the first one?
Oh yeah, yeah, something like that.
Yeah, maybe that's what it is.
So, this round of cats, like the ones from Egypt, at this point, they were likely more sociable and tame, so people started to bring them along for pest control all over the world. So they started getting on ships and being brought along, and as people expanded into Europe and things like that, then cats started going everywhere with people, and that is where the domestic cat comes from. Although, really, the domestic cat should be a subspecies, as it can interbreed with its wild counterparts, because one of the definitions of a species is that they can't breed together.
Yeah, technically. But... Technically.
Right. So, really, and some people do refer to the cat as... So the wild one is Phyllis sylvestris libica.
The domestic cat could be Phyllis sylvestris catus.
I guess that's where they got Sylvester the cat's name. In Blue Mutants.
She's connected those dots, connected those dots.
And again, a reason why they really shouldn't be their own species, listen to this case, this was blowing my mind. So wild and domestic cats show no difference in genetics. In fact, there is less difference between breeds of cats than there is between...
Differences between French and Italian people. Yeah, there's less genetic difference between a Persian cat and a Scottish fold than there is between Germans and Italians. Yeah, just crazy.
So there is no difference in genetics, so that's why they can interbreed. It's really just a couple of mutations. The only way domestication really shows up in a cat is through tabby markings.
Because they didn't exist before that.
Oh, wait, how do they know that?
I guess because of like art and...
But it's not like they drew all the cats anyway.
All the cats, no I don't. And then a few physical characteristics. So the tabby markings first showed up prolifically in the Middle Ages in the Ottoman Empire.
Later, they became common in Europe and Africa. And by the 18th century, so 1700s, tabby markings became associated with domestic cats. You know, that's like that M on their forehead and the blotchy stripes.
Domestic cats also have slightly shorter legs, a slightly smaller brain, and a longer intestine than their wild counterparts. Longer intestine because they're eating more, like less meat, more random stuff, like Doritos. Or whatever their food's eating, like mice that are eating more grain than wild mice.
And get this, breeds of cats weren't created until the 19th century. So we've only had cat breeds since the 1800s, so only for the past 200 years. And they all started pretty much in the British Isles.
Indigenous breeds, like the Siamese, or something like that, where you're like, well, what about them? They're clearly, like, they've been separate for a long time. And they've been around, Siamese have been around since at least 1350.
They think that's genetic drift because they weren't created. There was no wild populations to breed with, so they just started like going off on their own tangents. So Siamese breeds were not created, but things that we have now were.
Yeah, so the purpose of cats or why they're beneficial to have this mutual relationship with, Pest control, pest control, pest control.
Is there a benefit to having a cat? Because I don't know.
Absolutely, pest control, companionship, and sacrifice.
Not in that order.
First you are my companion, then I sacrifice you.
Yeah, pest control, and yeah, man, I tell him all the time, man, you've only got one job, okay, it is to make sure that mice and bugs are not running rampant in this apartment. Sometimes he does a terrible job at it. I've watched him just watch a fly and not try anything to do.
But our neighbor right now has mice in her apartment. I haven't seen a mouse, knock on wood. So Diggles is at least his scent alone, hopefully, is keeping his mice away.
And again, someone else I'm quoting here named Geigel says, I think that there was no need to subject cats to such a selection process since it wasn't necessary, since it was not necessary to change them. They were perfect as they were.
That's just inflating a cat's ego.
Well, and so that's the thing. Because humans never really domesticated cats, so we have, for the horses, we were selecting traits, we were selecting for endurance, we were selecting for a backbone.
Cat as a cat.
Cats never selected for anything. Until the 1800s, we started selecting for coat patterns and ear things. Okay.
So because of that, their behavior has not changed. Like, a cat is a cat. You just have to put a box in a tiger enclosure to know that, like, it's a cat, cats like boxes.
So that's one of the reasons why they think cats are such endearing pets is because they're just wild animals that happen to live in our houses.
Yeah, and they're okay with it because it's on their terms.
Right. It's a mutually beneficial relationship. There's no there.
And and that's why there aren't like crazy differences between cat breeds and that there's so little genetic difference. Whereas like with dogs, we selected for different jobs.
Yes.
Yeah. So there's crazy variety between them. Cats are pretty much all the exact same size.
Again, it's just their coats that are different. And yeah, they're they're almost identical. So today, there are around 100 breeds of cats, which is nuts because that's it in the last 200 years.
You can get a hypoallergenic cats now. There's one called the werewolf cat. You guys should look up looks crazy.
They think, though, that there might be like a domestic revolution for cats here coming because we have started. We have started bringing in other things. People are breeding like servals, so now we might start getting size differences and things like that.
And we're intentionally breeding things. And there's now more than 600 million cats in homes around the world. So 600 million mutually beneficial relationships.
And that's not including millions of feral cats.
Yeah, how many feral cats are out there?
And that's the domestication or not domestication of the cat. Surprising. No one.
Yeah. Well, my next one would could would be eaten by yours if given the opportunity. And it's the gerbil.
So so domesticated gerbils. This one has only been happening for the last, what, 70 years.
So you couldn't get a domestic gerbil before 70 years ago.
70.
70.
So so whenever we talk about domesticated gerbils, let's just talk about gerbils in general here.
I'm trying to think of what kind of band that would be.
I also thought maybe album.
All right. So gerbils are about four and a half to five inches tall with, I guess, I was like, how does one measure a gerbil? I was like from snout to butt, because then their tail can be an additional three to four inches.
It's only two to four ounces, so they are, you know, small. It's a gerbil. And adult males are larger than females.
So the animal was used in science and as a house pet. But again, like I said, only back until the 50s. So that's crazy to me.
I don't know.
So again, nobody throughout history was like, this is so cute, I'm going to keep it.
No, I mean, not to the point of like a domestication process of it. So whenever we talk about domesticated...
Just a couple of random weirdos who brought gerbils.
Probably, probably. Same thing with like pigeon people and mice people, you know? But whenever we talk about, when we think about like a pet gerbil, that's typically the Mongolian gerbil.
Mongolian gerbil. And so the Mongolian gerbil is from Mongolia, where they... Holes.
Yeah, right? Where they inhabit grasslands, shrub-landed desert, including, again, the steppes, the steppes in China, Mongolia, and the Russian, and in Russia. They...
I don't know how to say it.
I think you guys too are seeing a trend here. Domestication started in Asia.
Yeah, it really has. For...
Which totally makes sense, because it's the cradle of civilization.
And it branched out from there. But anyway... The first known mention of the gerbil, which came in 1866, by Father Armendar David, who sent quote-unquote, yellow rats to the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris, from northern China.
They were named Gerberilius Ungulaculus by the scientists in 1867. There is a popular...
So that's just the first time anyone even bothered to notice a gerbil? Like scientifically?
Yes, it was in the mid-1800s. Yeah. So there is a popular misconception about the meaning of the scientific name.
I don't know. I guess people... Just...
Because it talks about like Ed Homer's Iliad. However, the translation is like Claude Warrior, are incorrect.
That's what its name means?
Well, that's what people thought translation, translating ungaculus, gerbilus unguliculus.
Every time you say it.
I try.
So, but... So it's saying, like, due to the genus of Moronis, sharing the name with the Greek warrior Malonis in Homer's Iliad. So in that book, they said his name translated to Claude Warrior.
But they're saying...
So they think that...
They're saying that that's not... Yes, because in Iliad, that's what they said his name translated to, but that's not correct. But I also...
So his name was Gerbil. Like, they think...
Well, from the genus. From the genus. Moronis.
From the genus name of it. But in the book, they talked about that it meant Claude Warrior. So now I need to go look up this guy.
Which is a cool name for a gerbil. Yeah, the Claude Warrior.
Minus their three inches big. I'm not a gerbil! You can snap its neck if you sneeze hard enough.
But have you ever met a hamster?
Yeah, hamsters are mean.
Evil.
Yeah, they are. So anyway, the genus was named, again, Claude Warrior, by Johan Carl Wilhelm in 18...
You just...
I had to add the...
Johan Carl Wilhelm. Just nothing to do with...
Just had to... I gave it a B. Wilhelm.
No, I know, but before that, it's like you were getting ready to say like something with that. And then change to Wilhelm.
Anyway, there is a lot that goes back to it, but it's saying that the unciculate... unciculate means that...
No matter how much time I spend...
Guys, we need to support us more so that we can get Katie some lessons in Latin.
No matter how much... Believe it or not, I really do even Google pronunciation of these things prior, but once it says my ADHD, it's gone.
I was going to say, eventually your ADHD is going to make it into hyperfocus on Latin names. We just haven't gotten to that stage yet. Definitely not.
But the unciculate, or whatever it is in Greek, a meaning to have claws or nails in Latin, which can be loosely translated as to Claude Femur, apparently, because of all the...
It has a big difference between Claude, or you're in Claude Femur.
Yeah, so anyway, so again, like I said, gerbils only became popular as pets in 1954 when 20 males and 26 females were brought to the United States from eastern Mongolia for scientific testing, testing on a variety of things. So that's kind of where... And oddly enough, it wasn't until 10 years later that they were actually brought to the UK.
So in 1964, they were brought to the UK. So they were actually here first, which kind of skipped a step, because normally everything went from... But you figure by the mid-50s, we have airplanes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It can move things a little bit quicker. So anyway, gerbils have a long history of use in scientific research, which nowadays are very rarely used. For example, in the UK in 2017, only around 300 Mongolian gerbils were used in experiments compared to over 2 million mice.
Yeah. So I guess for a while they were using gerbils, not so much anymore. So most gerbils that were used in scientific research were derived from a particular strain of Mongolian gerbils that were sent to Japan in the early 19...
in early 1935. So they weren't domesticated. I couldn't really find why they were taken to Japan.
They were just taken to Japan.
Gerbil-napped.
Yeah, right? I don't know. Okay, so let's backtrack a little bit right before they started being used in the 50s.
So just before the 50s, the first ones were brought from China to Paris, like I said way earlier, in the early 19th century and became popular house pet there. So while they came to the United States in 54 to be used for experiments and research, they went to the French and became house pets.
Gotcha.
Gerbil-napped became popular pets in the US around the late 1950s, so it didn't take them very long. I don't know why they were made such horrible scientific... I couldn't find much on that either, but because they weren't being used for research, they quickly became pets.
So Mongolian gerbils, they prefer to live in pairs and groups rather than alone because they are social and gentle. And compared to hamsters, they don't really bite readily. They like to dig and make tunnels, and they're better suited for a tank with a lot of substrate in it, and they do spend a lot of time.
But reasons for their popularity, just of the talking of the pet side of it, several reasons include, they are not typically aggressive. Even if you try to provoke them, they typically won't bite you. You can just sit there and poke it, I guess, and it won't bite you.
They're small and easy to handle since they are sociable creatures that enjoy the company of humans and other gerbils. Gerbils have adapted their kidneys to produce a minimum waste and conserve body fluids, which makes them much cleaner than hamsters or other little small rodents, mammals. And then similar to everything else, once you start breeding them, we start breeding them specifically for their code patterns.
But something that, oddly enough, we haven't talked about yet with domestication are health concerns. So that's like anytime we've domesticated anything versus their wild counterparts, especially whenever you start to get into quote unquote purebred, which I don't think there's like purebred gerbils. I mean, I guess it would be like a Mongolian gerbil.
But they start to have, gerbils are commonly known to have teeth problems, misalignment of incisors just because of injury or malnutrition. They may result in overgrowth, which can cause injuries, like bite injuries on the roof of their mouth, because they're just like biting into the roof of their mouth. A lot of times, for a variety of reasons, because most of the time little kids have them, they suffer trauma from being dropped, fallen, stepped on, oftentimes within the side of a hamster ball.
So like they'll be put inside a hamster ball and then go down steps, dropped, whatever. About 20 to 50% of pet gerbils also have epilepsy. Again, it's, they said that the seizures are thought to be caused by fright handling and or a new environment.
Oh my gosh, the poor things.
But again, it's the breeding and breeding and breeding and breeding because you figure if they didn't come over here until the 50s, they were essentially lab gerbils at first, which are not like, they're bred for masses, not bred for, you know, health reasons. And then we started keeping them as pets, and they're tiny, so don't really care about like pure bred, you know, research gerbils. So most of them do have epilepsy.
They are known to have tumors. Tail slothing, gerbils can lose their tails due to improper handling, being attacked by another animal.
My only experience with a gerbil, middle school, someone brought in their pet gerbils and their tails just came off. It was so disgusting.
It was so gross. So gross. Tyzor's disease.
It's an infection in gerbils. It's like a bacterial disease. And they're also often deaf and have inner ear problems.
And it's all because people are just like, let's braid it. Yeah, and just kind of went crazy because they are bred to the masses. So what was the purpose originally whenever they were brought here?
It was for research so that they didn't have to experiment on humans, which then for whatever reason, they just went ahead and moved to mice. And then they became a popular pet just because why not? And especially within the 50s, besides like a dog, what's something easier to take care of than a dog?
Like a small mammal of some sort, hamster's bite, gerbils seem to be the way to go. So even though we haven't really had them around for all that very long, they are still a very popular pet, but clearly, because of domestication, like several other domesticated animals, they are known to have several, several health problems. Just because, again, whenever you don't breed them, I mean, that's why they say like a mutt is healthier than a purebred dog, because it's a mix of genetics, not just like, you know, one lineage.
Same old problems.
Yep, same old, same old. So that is the quick domestication of the gerbil.
Cool. Definitely a variety. So we hope you guys learned a bit today about how humans have domesticated a variety of species for different reasons, for companionship, to work, pest control, all sorts of things.
We will talk to everybody next week then.
Tune in next week.