Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're continuing Cat Week here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind. If you are not aware, it is Cat Week, a celebration of cats in our own weird stuff to Blow your Mind and eventually weird house cinema manner. In this episode, we're going to be talking about, to a large extent,
the domestication of cats. And when we think about the oldest human civilizations to value the domestic cat, I think a lot of us tend to, in many ways rightfully think about the ancient Egyptians. After all, the ancient Egyptians held the cat in high esteem, living with them, depicting them in their art, casting gods and their likeness, and
of course sometimes mummifying their remains. So you'd be quite excused, I think of you came into this episode assuming that that ancient egypt provided us with the earliest evidence of domesticated cats, and in fact up until I mean reasonably recently, like the early two thousands, but certainly recent enough that it occurred on the other end of a lot of our schooling used to this was exactly what was assumed based on evidence from something like thirty six hundred years
ago concerning the domestication of the Near Eastern and Egyptian populations of the African wildcat. But then in the early two thousands, as we'll be discussing, new archaeological findings pointed researchers to a new possible location for the oldest known evidence of domesticated cats, and that is on the Isle of Cyprus. For those of you trying to pull up the map in your own head, or perhaps you know, opening another window on whatever device you maybe I'll save
you a trip and a little brain power. The Mediterranean island of Cyprus is the third largest Mediterranean island after Sicily and Sardinia, and it was first settled by hunter gatherers approximately thirteen thousand years ago, and it's been uniquely situated over the millennia to experience cultural exchange with Europe, Africa,
and Asia, shaping the Cypriot culture. And so, as we'll discuss, it's possible that evidence of domesticated cats does indeed go back some nine five hundred years and of course then some maybe two ancient humans in.
Cyprus, that's right. But before we get to the archaeological evidence for cats as human companions on the island of Cyprus, I thought we should briefly look at the question how did cats become domesticated? Where does the cat come from? So my main source here is a paper by Atoni at all Claudio Atoni and co authors published in the journal Nature, Ecology and Evolution in twenty seventeen, and it's called the Palaeogenetics of Cat dis bersail in the Ancient World.
The top line here is the discovery. And this wasn't always known because there are a number of different wildcats sub varieties you find around the world. There you know, there's a European wild cat, there is a Central Asian wildcat, different wildcats you find all over the place, and so it was not always known where the domesticated cat came from.
But now researchers can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that all domesticated cats are thought to descend from an original population of wildcats native to North Africa and Southwest Asia, known as Felis silvestros libica, or the African wildcat. So the cats that are domestic cats around the world originally come from the subgroup of the African wildcats, and there appear to have been two waves of domestication.
So the authors of this paper a tony at all that they studied cat DNA collected from all around the globe and they determined through genetic analysis that cat domestication started first in the Fertile Crescent, that's the earliest time in the Neolithic period, that's the last part of the Stone Age, and then it accelerated in Egypt in the first millennium BCE.
So we can still basically look at our household cats and think think of them as being descendants of the goddess Bastett, right or bast So there's a lot of Egyptian heritage to the domestic cat species.
It does seem like ancient Egyptian civilization does contribute hugely to the domestic cats of today. But ancient Egypt was not the first time cats were domesticated. That seems to be in the Fertile Crescent a little bit earlier in the in the Neolithic period.
But maybe the last time they would be domesticated. Because it seems like we're done, it seems like we're at a good, good level with the current domestication of the of the of the common healthcat.
I think they're here to stay. But speaking of the idea that a domestication attempt of an animal could not stick around, I was reading about an interesting variation in a paper by an author that we'll come back to several times in this episode. A paper by Jean Denis Vignert and a bunch of co authors from PLUS one in twenty sixteen called earliest domestic cats in China identified
as leopard cat. So in this paper the authors agree that all domestic cats today are descended from the African wildcat, so it's not a dispute about like the leopard cat being a part of the genetic heritage of any cat
that you would find in a house today. Instead, this paper documents archaeological remains from China dating from between fifty five hundred to forty nine hundred years before present, showing what appeared to me to be domesticated cats buried in human contexts, so found in human storage areas or dwellings, and analysis of the bones of these animals shows that these are not African wildcats, but rather from a historically short lived attempt to domesticate the Asian leopard cat and
now an extant wild animal.
Wow, that is fascinating. Yeah, I mean you think about we tend to think about the domestication success stories, and you know, with the cat, I think we're still figuring out how successful that was. I know, I had my own household cat just pee all over the place this morning, So yeah, it definitely gave me some time for a little A few sidebars. As I was finishing the research for this episode, it's like, have we reached a good
point with this domestication. I'm not sure, but clearly there are cases where there's even less of a match and where not enough lines up in short enough time for the domestication to really take hold.
Well yeah, I mean I guess you're sort of asking this question now, but yeah, it raises the question like what counts as domesticated? Like how sticky does the relationship have to be between the humans and these animals for it to really be domesticated, Because yeah, in the case of these semi domesticated or proto domesticated leopard cats, the practice appears to have died out. There's not like a widespread, you know, population of domesticated leopard cat descendants.
Yeah. Yeah, imagine there are a number of different elements, like the cultural attachment, religious significance, and then just is it useful? Like are they serving a purpose in the household or on you know, or on the land surrounding the household? Are they killing the enemies of man? And so forth?
I have to wonder. I don't have direct evidence of this, but I have to wonder if the spread of the domesticated African wildcat descendant could have possibly replaced, you know, previous attempts to domesticate cats or cat like animals.
That's a good point, yeah, because if you're kind of like putting in a lot of work to try and domesticate these leopards and then someone shows up with something maybe a little more, a little more closely aligned to what we think of as a modern house cat, yeah, you might be inclined to think, well, heck, let's just go at this.
This model seems to work.
So how did domestic cats come to cover the entire globe? Since the African wild cat is native to North Africa and the Middle East, how did it spread all over the world? A TONI had all determined by looking at DNA from cat remains, especially in major ancient port cities. That domestic cats spread around the world on ships, it had to have been by sea travel that they made it from place to place and eventually basically to the whole world. And they argue, I think this makes a
lot of sense. They were probably kept aboard ships to kill rats and mice that would otherwise get into food stashes during transport. And this will be a theme. Actually. You know, it's funny how a lot of people listening probably today do not think of the cat as like
a functional or working animal. It's a companion animal. You have a cat, you know, to be friends with it, you know, to feel nice when you're petting it and taking care of it, to feel good, just you know, getting that reciprocal relationship of companionship and mutual enjoyment with another creature. But for much of history the cat had a job to do.
Absolutely, And you know, I don't know, I still think about this. I think of my cat primarily as a companion animal. But you know, there are times where you know, live I live near some railroad tracks, there's always there's some there are rodents out there, and so it does cross my mind from time to time. That she is also kind of like the last line of defense that I Odin's center the house. It's her job to take to take care of it, and if not, I will satirize her with poetry so hard.
Well, you better be careful you don't summon the King of Cats.
Well, yeah, I'm not going to drag him into this. I'm gonna just target Mochi, my cat with that.
Oh right, I forgot what Shaun chan Jin was not. Did he not satirize cats hard enough to invite the King of cats just like to protect them on the Did he actually have to satirize the King of cats himself?
He went straight to the King of cats because he's like, it's like cats are under his jurisdiction and cats have failed me and not eating the mice that ate this egg that I was going to eat. Yeah, yeah, okay, he went straight to the top.
You run in his mouth about the boss. That's a bad idea. Oh but this all brings us back to the connection between cats and the island of Cyprus and the Mediterranean, because, as you were alluding to earlier, Rob, it seems that our earliest archaeological evidence of cat human companionship may be in an ancient Stone age grave on the island of Cyprus.
That's right, And so we're gon we're gonna skip over Egyptian cats here and mostly focus on Cyprus. But I do want to note that we could easily come back in another episode, maybe next Cat Week, maybe sooner, and discuss the ancient Egyptians and their cats. But again, this was an important find. This really changed the way we
understood humanity's relationship with domesticated or nearly domesticated felines. And again this is the work of French scientists Jean Denis Vignier of the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris,
along with his co authors. The big initial paper was Early Taming of the Cat in Cyprus, published in two thousand and four in the journal Science, and it essentially set the clock back, I believe, like a good five thousand years on what we understood about humanity's relationship with a domesticated cat. Yeah, so this is essentially how it went down, And Joe, we were both looking at the same sources here, so jump in if you want to expand on anything that I'm mentioning here. But essentially the
researchers discovered a mostly complete skeleton. And I want to add the caveat that it seems to have been buried in complete form. It's just parts of the skeleton were damaged at some point or another.
And the fact that it's in complete form is important for reasons. We'll get into it in a minute.
Exactly. Yes, so mostly complete skeleton of an eight month old cat next to the nine five hundred year old grave of a human being. And this grave was located in the Shiluru Combas archaeological site. This is a pre Pottery Neolithic b site. I'm to understand this was a settlement occupied from the end of the ninth till the end of the eighth millennium BCE. And this is in southern Cyprus, a site that had been first excavated just
a decade earlier. And this would have been one of the Neolithic people that had traveled from the mainland bringing crops and livestock to Cyprus, not individually one of the people, I mean more broadly, like the people the strain of humanity that came to the island.
Right, so, sometime previous in the previous few thousand years, there had been settlers from the mainland. Originally occupants of somewhere in the Fertile Crescent were Stone Age humans that got in boats and made their way to the island.
Yeah. Yeah, So this particular human that was buried again alongside this cat was apparently about thirty when they died, and they were buried with various items, which was always interesting to see what kind of items they were buried with, or at least the ones we know about because they've
survived in one form or another. And it consisted of a marine shell, a stone pendant, a flint scraper, two small polished axes and those was damaged, a pumice stone, a fragment of ochre, a large flint piercing tool, and then several flint blades, so a lot of utilitarian tools on their body. They'd probably been buried in a bag placed in a circular pit that also contained various additional shells and stones. The cat's grave was oval shaped and
about fifteen centimeters deep. The body was seemingly again complete at burial, though parts of it were destroyed I believe by plowing, because it was like the uppermost bones that had been damaged here and the cat was laid out on its side, head to the west and back to the south. That happens to be the exact same positioning as the human buried beside it. The cause of death for the feline could not be determined, but evidence suggested that it had not been cut, had not been burned,
its body had not been opened up. Gender of the cat was unknown due to missing or destroyed pelvic bone pieces, So.
We don't know if the cat died of nashe causes or was killed, but the evidence of its death was not clear.
Right, It's entirely possible that it could have been killed as a sacrifice and buried alongside the human, but there's no evidence that that happened. There's no evidence that that didn't happen. And you know, it's not like either possibility really alters the argument for this animal being important to the person who's buried with I mean, either way, it has a privileged position alongside the human, or vice versa, the human has a privileged position alongside the cat.
Yeah. Well, and the really important thing here being that it's clear to the archaeologists that this cat was intentionally
buried on purpose. This isn't it's not a situation where like, oh, a cat was running around and it just happened to die near the grave, and they're mistaking it for and for there were several reasons for thinking that this is an intentional burial alongside the human, not just the proximity it is right beside the other grave, but also you mentioned the fact that the cat's skeleton was articulated, maybe like the joints and were still connected and intact.
Basically, yeah, and Vigne also points out that the mere fact that it was buried like this articulated almost entirely intact, if not entirely intact, it means it was likely a tame species because when wild animals were rarely buried during this time, the skeletons were generally rather incomplete. So just everything about the way this creature has been buried, in the way that, the way it's positioned, and so forth, it seems to indicate that this animal was likely domesticated
to some degree. And we should also note that these findings Vigner backs up by pointing to various other cat remains found at least in pieces elsewhere on the island, and also the idea. He mentions the idea that cats had special status among these individuals is also backed up by discovery of figurines in neighboring regions from this time, as well as the one that was found at the same archaeological site in Cyprus, though from a slightly earlier time.
So everything seems in place here to suggest. Yeah, a tame cat, a cat that is that is considered close to humans for one reason or another. We'll get into more about, you know, some of those reasons. And and also by a culture that that values the cat enough to create its likeness. Again, maybe for religious purposes, maybe you know, for some other purpose, but they certainly held the cat in the high esteem.
Now, another thing that would be interesting to know is do we know what kind of cat this was?
Yes? Yeah, So Vigner contends that that the quote the post cranial and cranial measurements fall in the upper half of the range variation of size of the western Asian Felis Silvestris livica. So this does seem to be the African wildcat. And I'm only just now realizing that the cartoon cat Sylvester gets its name probably from this. Well.
I think the name Sylvester means like from the forest or of the woods, though I assume that's what it means in the context of this cat's name as well the cartoon cat, well, the real species and the cartoon cat. Okay, I don't know about the cartoon cat. That probably just yeah, maybe that comes.
From this, but anyway, this does seem to be the African wildcat, so the ancestor of the domestic cat, though this would of course have been the earlier domestication wave, not the one that really took hold. And this specimen was apparently bigger than a modern domestic cat, had longer limbs, but it is definitely an African wildcat. Points out that there's no evidence of a native field species of cat on Cyprus, so they would have had to have been introduced by these neolithic settlers.
Yeah, and I'll have more on that in just a minute.
So this updated timeline would put the domestication just three thousand years after the likely domestication point of the dog, and alongside the human domestication of the sheep mastery of wheat as well. So I think settlers of Katan fans out there will recognize that this is just one stone short of getting to buy a development cost. So this is a big deal and when it comes to the advancement of your civilization.
But does it help you with the longest road.
Nope, You're going to need what bricks and wood for that.
Now, just a note about the timeline of dog domestication, because I think reading about the timeline of dog domestication can be confusing sometimes because while the earliest undisputed archaeological evidence of a dog buried with humans comes from the fifteenth millennium before present, so that that's from a site in modern Germany, genetic evidence shows that modern domestic dogs began to diverge from their wolf ancestors something like twenty
to forty thousand years ago. I think there are some different figures on that commonly cited range. So genetic evidence shows the process beginning much earlier, But the genetic evidence doesn't tell us exactly how domesticated those proto dogs or
divergent wolves were in terms of behavior and living arrangements. So, for example, it could be that for thousands of years these proto dogs were only partially domesticated, not necessarily treated as companions, but genetically and behaviorally adapted to increased interaction with human populations. One example of this would be following
humans around and scavenging their camps. So yeah, the truth is we don't know exactly when people started treating dogs like pets or like working animals, but the first clear archaeological evidence for that kind of relationship comes from the fifteenth millennium before now. And again, like with the cat example, that's from an example of humans being buried along with their dog. I think it's from a couple being buried with their dog.
It's also going to fusing because sometimes we use BP in measuring this, because we're just saying before Pluto, before Pluto, the Disney cartoon dog. Yeah, so it's essentially the same, but it's off by a few decades.
So apart from the proximity to a human grave, one clue that the cat skeleton found at schileuro Cambos might have been a domesticated cat begins with the observation that, as you said a minute ago, Rob, the African wildcat, was not native to Cypress before the arrival of humans. That's worth stressing there were no wildcats on Cypress at all, and we know that pretty conclusively from the fossil record.
No cats. In fact, the fossil record indicates that before humans there were very few terrestrial mammals at all on Cypress. This is probably because even during glacial maximum periods the sea levels were at their lowest, Cypress was never connected to the mainland, so the only pre human terrestrial mammals on Cypress appear to have been The following one was
the dwarf hippopotamus. This seems to have gone extinct when humans arrived, which was about twelve five hundred years before present, so they were very likely hunted or otherwise driven extinct by humans. The dwarf elephant also disappeared when we showed up. The Cypriot genet, which is a small carnivore sort of a catlike weasel like creature, a little bit raccoony maybe it's got a long tail, may have survived a few thousand years after humans arrived, but it is now extinct.
And then finally, the Cypriot mouse, which is the only native land mammal from Cypress that still exists today.
And you know, that's quite a compliment for the Cypriot mouse to have survived given what is about to follow.
Well, mice are hardy, but yeah, when humans show up on an island, we do a lot of damage, especially us and the things we bring with us.
Do you think humans are the reason that the hippopotamus and the elephant disappeared? Just a coincidence size.
So, since cats were not native to the island and thus not acquired locally, we know that ancient humans and these would have been in Stone Age farmers originally from the Fertile Crescent, must have crossed the sea with cats
in their boats. And given the size of the boats that would have been used, and given the fact that you need multiple breeding pairs to establish a stable island population, it's just not very plausible that we could be dealing with the case of cat stowaways that established themselves on an island. That's not I don't know, it's not impossible, but it seems very unlikely.
Right, especially because you know, to be clear, over the course of time, unlikely introduction do occur. We see that, especially when you go beyond the span of human civilizations and you look at just like you know, more like geologic time.
But this is about millions of years is years.
This is within the range of human domain, and it suspiciously involves an animal that humans took a liking to yes.
Yeah, so it seems much more likely that humans brought cats to Cyprus across the sea on purpose. But why Well, one clue is that cats were not the only non native animal species introduced by humans. So here I want to reference another paper again where Jean Deni Vignier is the first author. This one is called Historical Dynamics of the Human Environment Interactions in Cyprus during the twelfth to tenth millennium before present the last thirty years of contributions
of the Amathus area. This was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports in the year twenty twenty three, once again by vigne at All. So in this paper the authors are actually looking at a lot of different stuff. They're tracking what we know about how the physical environment of Cyprus changed before, during, and after its early colonization
by humans. And they look at quote, hydrological changes and their impact on the establishment and preservation of Neolithic sites, Plant and vertebrate faunal evolution, especially as a consequence of the introduction of new wild and domestic species. Birth and evolution of the commensal fauna e g. Mice, cats and crows,
and commensal fauna means things living alongside. Commensalism in biology is typically it's a type of symbiotic relationship in which one organism gets a benefit and the other is not really affected one way or another. And then the list goes on local domestication of wild boar and goats, adaptation and intensification of cultiv and breeding to the local environments, so to zoom in specifically on the introduction of new
animal species. The author is right that the first introduction we have evidence of is actually the wild bore, which was established on the island during the Epipalaeolithic, probably as hunting stock. So the bore remains found on Cyprus show insular dwarfism, meaning that they're about fifteen percent smaller than the mainland variety and they were often wounded with arrowheads.
So this would be an interesting early case of intentional animal management, or like game management, bringing a live stock of a wild species to an island to release so that it can establish itself there and so you can hunt it on the island.
Yeah. Yeah, this is fascinating to think about because I know it for my own part. I often think about this more when I'm thinking about Europeans, you know, setting off during the age of Discovery and as well as the the as well as the expansion you know of Polynesian, Micronesian and so forth, seafaring folks coming to an island and realizing, Hey, nice island here, but there's nothing to eat here. I better leave some pigs, I better leave some goats, and then I can come back in. This
island will be my larder. But you know, clearly this has been in the human playbook for a very long time.
Right, I mean this is like thousands of years before I imagine there was such a practice. Yeah, so seeding, Yes, seeding an island with a new game species that can be hunted for generations to come. But then well after the introduction of the board during the eleventh millennium before present, we get other mammals appearing, and this includes domestic dogs brought from the levant, the Western European house mouse, and cats. This would be the African wildcat, as we've been talking
about now. To clarify, there is no evidence that the wildcats brought along were initially treated as companions or had any special significance to humans. That evidence would start to appear more than a thousand years later. With that human
cat co burial. So why were cats brought The authors here argue that it was likely that African wildcats were brought to Cyprus as an already semi domesticated commensal species that were valued for pest control, because if you are a farming society and you take foods, you take grain or other food somewhere with you, it is pretty much a guarantee that rodents are sneaking along for the ride, or that there are already rodents where you're going, and
either way they're going to get into your food. Rodent attacks on human food caches are just a perennial problem for human cultures going back as far as we have evidence. So if these moody, little carnivorous critters, these cats already like to hang out around your villages and kill the mice, it is definitely worth bringing some of them along with you when you move to a new place across the sea. So these early cats were probably intentionally brought to Cyprus
for the purpose of pest control. And then after this, well around the same time, maybe a few hundred years later, we start to see some other things goats and cattle. Goats seem to have been treated not as domestic animals initially, but as wild game stocks. So kind of like the bors like hunted for some time wild on the island before they were either domesticated or redomesticated on the island.
They may have been domesticated earlier on the mainland and then released wild on the island, but eventually they get redomesticated or domesticated for the first time. Then after this we start to see more introductions. You get fallow deer again brought and established as a wild population, and then to domestic sheep, and then curiously, I thought this was so interesting. Foxes.
Foxes.
Foxes not native to the island of Cyprus. They were not there on their own. They had to have been brought by humans. It is hard to imagine foxes could establish themselves by accident, like just stowing away in boats. Right again, you need multiple breeding pairs to have a stable population there. How would you get enough foxes to the island. Uh, It's it's harder for foxes to stow away than it is for mice.
I think, why bring them?
Like?
I don't know. This seems along the lines of, say, intentionally introducing raccoons to this.
Is like you to get into your trash cans.
Yeah. Like, well, I mean, and I imagine, you know, folks living in urban foxes probably see that as a more direct comparison. Yeah, but like, ye, why bring the foxes?
Uh? The authors say, we don't know, we don't know why they brought the foxes. Maybe this is just a guess. There's not a reason to think this. You're just having to guess. Maybe foxes had some kind of cultural or religious significance to the settlers. Possibly the physical evidence indicates that foxes were not hunted and they were tolerated as
commensals in the early Cypriot villages. The authors say, quote this also strengthens the idea that early Neolithic people were experimenting with a lot of different systems of relationships with animals. So just like just try it out, why not?
Yeah, I mean, if you if you think about like the idea of bringing cats with you, and these cats are not necessarily your friends. They just live in the same area and they eat something, they kill something that is useful to you that they're.
They're killing them enemy of my enemy.
Yeah. Yeah, so maybe something similar with foxes here, Like we have seen the foxes eat the mice or something that we don't want around. They seem to have a meaningful purpose, so let's just bring them along.
Yeah, I wonder, Yeah, could boxes have possibly been thought of as pest control? I don't know how plausible that is. Somebody who has more experienced with foxes please write in about that. Is that plausible that there were a complementary pest control system? Possibly? Once again, I want to make clear the authors don't say that we don't know.
Yeah, And it seems to me anyway that it like the discovery that any of these introductions could backfire on us is a pretty recent revelation for human beings. So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe earlier civilizations did realize that they could blow it introducing animals intentionally for one purpose and then it just doesn't work out. But yeah, but either way, they had to have some reason to bring them there, and it's yeah, it's fascinating to try and guess what
that could have been. They just like the look of them, maybe.
Yeah, Well, I would not dismiss the idea of people simply liking the look of cats. In the gradual evolution of the cat from a working animal, you know, a commensal tolerated because of their pest can troll capabilities into becoming a companion animal that you would want to have sit in your lap and pet and feed and have buried alongside you.
Yeah. Yeah, And I imagine another thing you could factor in is always how cute do the pops look? How cute do do the kittens look? And so forth. I mean that has been a major factor with dogs and cats and various other animals. You know, if they kind of look like human babies, if they get that cute response out of us, then that has a benefit to us, but it also really benefits the animal that we are inevitably trying to domesticate. It's true, baby foxes are quite cute.
I imagine I'm not summoning an image to my mind right off the bat, but I'm just going to assume they're very cute to look at. So, yeah, maybe that's part of it.
But how this relationship evolved on Stone age cypress, we don't know. We can only speculate. But Rob, you had some other stuff on cats and cypress for more recent history, right.
That's right. There are still domesticated cats on the isle of Cypress, which should not come as a surprise to anyway, because domesticated cats are everywhere now and there's a part yeah there again they're here to stay. I think this
is the last domestication of the African wild cat. And there's there's apparently no known connection between all of the cats you'll find there on Cypress today and and this, you know, the so called ancient Cypriot wild cat, this this initial wave of domestication that we see in the archaeological record there. But the Cypress cat is a designated
domestic cat breed found on the island. Again, just a breed of domestic cat, sometimes called the Saint Helen cat and sometimes called the Saint Nicholas cat.
So if you are those two things are the same animal.
Yes, But I want to walk through the saintly connections here, and in this we're going to be dealing more with a lot of legends as in some fact, but certainly less science. So let's let's discuss this Saint Helen connection first. This refers to Helena of Constantinople, who would have lived two forty six or two forty eight through three point thirty CE, mother of Constantine the first and she does
again an actual historic person here who does. It does seem like she may have spent some time in Cyprus, as it was under her patronage. And the legend here is that she imported hundreds of cats from Egypt, or Persia or Palestine. The exacts on this seemed to vary.
I've seen various sources that point to different places, but somewhere that had cats, she, according to this legend, ship them in like a thousand or so, and this would have been in the fourth century CE, and the purpose was to rid the monastery there which she founded of snakes.
There are a lot of legends about the travels and pilgrimages of Saint Helen. I know it said also that didn't she make a journey to find the True Cross?
Well, a lot of that going on.
Yes, she was at least one of the people who found the True Cross.
Yeah, so take all of these legends with at least a grain of salt, you know, especially what we were dealing from saints with saints from this era like this is where you can potentially run into the problem of like this person has there are too many relics out there. They're more relics than she had. Bones, not specifically in this case. But that sort of thing can sometimes occur. There's a lot of legends that build up around these individuals, even though at the core we're dealing with an actual
human being who existed. So snakes, yeah, Cypress is home to numerous snake species, venomous and non venomous. There's one that's actually called the cat snake, and there's a there's one called the Cypress whipsnake, and this one is endemic to Cypress. But this is the legend that the monastery had a snake problem, and so Saint Helena brings in a bunch of cats, or has cats brought in. According to the Slate.
I was just picturing her trying to bring them all herself.
Oh God, yes, I mean yeah, if you try to, trying to bring one would be a task. I can't I don't even want to imagine, Like the effort is like load up the ship with a thousand cats. That's going to be a pretty cross ship by the time you get over. But according to the Slate article, the Holy Monastery of Saint Nicholas of the Cats solved a snake problem with felines. This is by Eric Grundhauser. I also looked at the website of the author, Charlotte Wriggle
Charlotte Wriggle dot com. She has some materials on this, and basically legend has it that Cypress was in the midst of an epic drought at the time. I've seen it given an account of like thirty seven years of drought, and it's just driving the snakes indoors in search of water. And namely it's mainly it's running them into the monastery, so they're trying to do the Lord's work in there, but they're just too many snakes. Somebody's got to do something about these snakes.
Sounds like this up to a a I don't know, ancient Snakes on a plane prequel.
Essentially, the legend makes it sound like that level of infestation, like it's just completely out of control, and it's driving people off the island, Like people are leaving Cyprus because they're just too many snakes.
Popping out of the Holy Water basin, yeah, dangling from the ceiling.
Yeah. So this this led me to wonder a little bit like is this at all reasonable? Like is this just purely legendary? Is it possible that snakes would get this out of control? I mean, one potentially one way to think about this is that we should mentioned that this is not the only tidbit from the ancient world about snake infestations getting out of control, or or particular
problem snakes interfering with the machinations of various rulers. There are various accounts of plagues of serpents, of course, depictions descriptions rather of foreign lands and enemy battlefields that are infested with snakes and other undesired creatures, and of course a lot of that you can you can think about from various angles, like how are you gonna how do you want to insult the land of foreigners? You can just say, oh, it's just nothing but snake, snakes and scorpions everywhere.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of these they just sound like obvious exaggeration. Though then again, I don't want to say it provides any evidence that this particular story is true. But we have talked on the show before about great gatherings of snakes, like at the narciss how do we pronounce it the narcissa or narciss snake.
Yeah.
Again, to be clear, I'm not saying like, oh, that's what's happening here, and therefore the story is true. But snakes can gather in massive numbers.
I mean, anyone who's ever been around snakes you know that, yes, snakes do enter into human areas, and when they do, given the place that snakes hold in our minds, you know that the threat that snakes can pose to us, the fact that we are often frightened by snakes, and also all of the layers of meaning that we attribute to snakes, all of this makes it meaningful when a snake is where we don't think a snake should be.
Yeah, yeah, this is magic, this is a curse.
Yeah there was. Looking around for other examples of it honestly gets a little confusing at times, looking for even
legendary histories that are referring to snake infestations. One reason I've found is that there are certain works of Mormon apology jedics out there that talk about some of this apparent There is apparently an incident in the Book of Mormon that involves a serpent infestation, and so some at at least some of these works of apologetics like attempt to back this up with other examples from ancient history.
As with any work of apologetics, we often have to take that with a grain of salt, because obviously, you know it's it's an attempt to back up certain ideas with an interpretation of reality.
Yeah, religious apologetics being one of the most straightforward forms of motivated reasoning. Yeah, but not without value as literature. I mean, it can still point you to these these real examples, but it doesn't necessarily prove that you know the story they're using it as evidence.
For now, this one doesn't involve a bunch of snakes. It just involves one giant snake, and that it involves the adventures of Roman general Marcus Attilius Regulus during the First Punic War. His troops are said to have encountered a giant snake and it just became like a whole battle, like essentially a kaiju battle.
Wait, where are you saying in on Cyprus.
Or no, no, this is elsewhere in the Oh okay, sorry, sorry, this was not on Cyprus, but just an example of a snake showing up in another legend about it and again another historic individual, though in this case it is not mentioned in the primary histories. For instance, it's not in the writings of Polybius about the Punic Wars. It's in, you know, sort of secondary sources, and it's thought to just generally be a legend, a tall tale about how great this guy was. I see now elsewhere in legends
and tall tales about holy places infested by snakes. There are a couple of stories that popped up, and I realized, yes, we're getting a little far away from cats here, but these were too fascinating to not cover on the show. So from the seventh century CE there is the story of Saint Hilda's Abbey. This is in Yorkshire, in Britain. This is all also the area where Count Dracula moves to in Bromstoker's Dracula.
By the way, Oh interesting, did I forget about it? In the novel? Does he not actually come directly to London. He goes somewhere up in the north.
I believe. I believe so now I haven't actually I haven't actually read Dracula in a number of years. I've mostly been watching various cinematic adaptations that drift pretty far from the sourus at times. But there does seem to be a Dracula connection here, very loose loosely, but I'm gonna mention it. So the idea here is that Saint Hilda's Abbey was infested by snakes until Hilda of Whitby
turned them to stone with I guess holy magic. And there is actually a science tie into this legend, though as it seems to be a there seems to be a strong case for geo mythology here in order to explain the presence of fossilized ammonites in the area. Oh, now, you can look up images of ammonites here if you're If you're not instantly recognizing them, but once you see them, you go like, oh, yes, that I've seen that fossil many times. You know, it essentially has the look It
does look like something curled up. You can easily be mistaken for a curled up serpent or a curled up centipede or something that has been fossilized.
Yeah, ammonites were cephalopods that lived in the sea that went extinct the KPg extinction along with the dinosaurs, the non avian dinosaurs. But yeah, the fossils will be basically a spiral shell because they had a spiral shell shape, kind of like nautiluses today. But from what I understand, they're more closely related to some other species than the nautiluses, but they look superficially similar. And yeah, and you can
still find lots of fossils of these shells. I remember coming across amonite fossils and reading about the discovery of a lot of ammonite fossils on the Jurassic Coast in England when I was there.
Yeah, so you can imagine folks running across these and thinking these look like snakes that have been turned to stone. And then to add an extra layer here and kind of getting back to apologetics, and to a certain extent, you have examples where where these ammonites have then been carved a little serpent's head or something's supposed to be a serpent's head has been carved at the very end of the of the creature to make it look like it is a snake. And you can you can look
images up of this online as well. The one I found here I shared with you. Joe looks so much like the sandworms from Beetlejuice, but except friendlier. It doesn't have sharp teeth, and it's going high. Yeah, he doesn't look as fearsome and looks a little duck like I'm just a little snake. Now there's another legend I ran across.
This is a legend of the monastery of Langovarda in Greece, located on the island of Catalonia, in which the snakes are said to have actually defended the monastery against pirates. And I believe seventeen oh five.
That's my kind of story. I like that. I like a trap for intruders that involves animals, like a pit, a mote with piranhas in it, a pit full of snakes, something like that crab pit, crab pit, that'd be really good.
Well, in this case, it was snakes protecting nuns that were living there at the time. And then afterwards these snakes find Christ, they become holy snakes, sometimes said to have crosses on their heads, and then they show up at the monastery it's said in the days leading up to August fifteenth, the feast of the Dormition of the Virgin Mary. So essentially right now, this place is sometimes called the Monastery of the Virgin Mary, of the Snakes, of the snakes. You can look up pictures of these
snakes too. I don't know, I'm not seeing the cross on their foreheads so much, but you know this is more of a this is more an article of faith rather than a matter of herpetology.
Okay, well, I've really enjoyed this snake hunt. But does this inform our attempt to answer the question is there any historical truth to the idea of Saint Helena bringing a bunch of snakes to the monastery in Cyprus to or not sorry, not snakes, bringing cats to the monastery to get rid of the snakes.
I don't know that it actually provides additional answers, but yeah, I guess I'll just come back to like, when you're dealing with snakes, a snake is just such a loaded creature. We have so many thoughts about the snakes, so many layers of meaning with the snake, and so the legends just pile up. But yeah, there are other accounts of snake infestations being a thing, and you know, we do
see examples. There are places in the world where snakes do become a problem, soecially when you're dealing I mean mainly when you're dealing with venomous snakes, because a non venomous snake is essentially going to do as good, if not more good, than having a cat around. I mean, it's not as maybe not as too many people's eye, not as friendly, maybe not as cutly. Though, listeners who keep snakes, you will say, no, this cat, this particular snake,
is cutly. But and you know you have a strong case to make there as well.
I want to hear from listeners who have cats and snakes which one is cuddlier. Well, wait a minute, hold on, there's a mystery here. So that explains why the cats of Cyprus would be called Saint Helen's cats or Saint Helena cats. But wasn't there another name for them, Saint Nicholas cats or something.
Right, And and you might be thinking, well, this couldn't possibly be Santa Claus, right, But you'd apparently be wrong, because as far as I can tell, this is supposed to be the Saint Nicholas, who then went on to Mira and, through the accumulation of legend and holiday tradition,
becomes the figure of Santa Claus. According to the aforementioned sources, as well as the Virginia Theological Seminary Saint Nicholas Center, this was supposedly where the future Saint Nicholas was at the time, like he was there at this monastery, potentially like ringing the bell for the for the cats to come and eat the snakes.
Whoa yet another crazy Saint Nicholas story. Do you know the one about how he resurrected the three boys who had been chopped up and pickled and cooked in a pot or something.
Oh, I'd forgotten about them, but yeah, I think that that does ring a bell. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the the the legends of Saint Nicholas, we get pretty fascinator.
Gets here in the Christmas spirit.
So the monastery or the Monastery of the Holy Monastery of Saint Nicholas of the Cats, is still around. It became known for taking in stray cats. The local fishermen would for a while reportedly donate their entire catch to the cats on the feast day of Saint Nicholas. And you know, it's a lot has happened over the course of its existence, but apparently it's still around today as an active monastery and an active cat sanctuary. Like you see, you see people visiting it and taking photos in there.
Indeed are a lot of cats, arguably maybe too many cats, but this is a place where they're allowed to do their thing.
Nonsense it's beautiful cat Heaven Monastery.
So Cypress. So if you are a cat fancier and you're trying to plan your next cat based vacation, maybe Cypress is your destination.
By the way, I looked up the Cypress cat breed in my opinion certified cute.
Well, which cats are not cute? Really?
I guess that's true.
I mean, I know we'll get some answers for some of my listeners out there, but it's all subjective.
It's got fur, it's got big ears. What more could you want? Well, Rob, shall we wrap this up before the King of Cats comes a knocking?
Yes, I think we should. This will be the end of our second core episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind here for Cat Week, but we have one more episode, Weird House Cinema tomorrow will also be cat based. And you know, I didn't expect it to be this way, but I feel like the movie we're going to be talking about really lines up with a lot of the actual serious cat information we've been discussing in the core episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I think the
King of Cats would approve. Okay, so tune in for that if you're interested. It is a title that has also been suggested over the years by Weird House Cinema listeners.
You are invited tune in if you don't want yourisan to repute to shreds.
Exactly all right, Just a reminder that Stuff to bliw your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema. If you want to follow us online, we're on several of the main social media platforms. Whichever one you use, look us up, you'll probably find us there. You can follow Weird House Cinema
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