Selects: How Animal Domestication Works

it turns out to be super interesting. I hope you enjoy it and spend the rest of your day patting yourself on the back. Go ahead, you deserve it. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bright, and our buddy Noel who's producing us. Yeah. Uh, and that's stuff you should know it. How's it going fine? Why do you guys? That's just friendly? The ice breaker? Oh?

I see, yeah, as if we didn't just record another joke, we did. It was on police and terrogage. That's right, So Chuck, Yes, you've heard of Jared Diamond before? Right? No? Yes? Rang familiar guns, germs and steel Okay, he uh he Um wrote Collapse. He's known for that those two books. Don't think I know that one. I think it came after guns Terms and steel Um. But he wrote one of my favorite journal articles of all time is called the Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

about agriculture, about transitioning to agriculture. I was going to guess on what that might be. Oh, sorry, that's right. What do you what do you guess that it's about the agriculture. Well, the thing is is it may be the worst mistake in the history of the human rights. I've talked about it a million times. Um. The article

that is um. But he also wrote this really interesting article called Evolution, Consequences and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication, which sounds extremely boring, and it's in Nature, the journal Nature.

That it isn't boring. It's really really interesting because in it he talks about animal domestication and he says that it came about as a result of typically and about the same time as agriculture, the Neolithic revolution, where we went from hunter gatherers to agriculturists right to farmers, and everything changed, like we grew shorter in stature, our brains grew smaller, um our jaws grew shorter. Um. We we got just weird in a bunch of different ways, right, Um.

And it was as a result of agriculture. And if you look at what happens when we domesticate animals, when we take them from the wild and we plant them next to us on a farm, the same thing happens. So his point is, what he's arguing is that not only did humans domesticate animals, humans in turn have become

domesticated themselves through agriculture. Yeah, there's probably nothing that's had a greater impact, no single transition or change or concept that's had a greater impact on Homo sapiens than the Neolithic revolution or the transition to agriculture. And a big part of that was the domestication of animals. Yeah, they kind of went hand in hand, in a hoof in hand, which to me is hilarious because consider this, I think this is the funniest thing I've ever thought of in

my life. Imagine being an alien come down to Earth, all right, and uh, you're just walking along taking everything in and you see a human riding horse and us it's a human riding a horse. It makes during complete sense. But if you're an alien, you see an animal riding in their animal, and that would have to be the funniest thing you've ever seen ever. If you're a margin, Yeah, an animal riding another animal. Yeah, you know, like those little cowboy monkeys that ride dogs and stuff like that.

It's hilarious. And that same thing, it's the exact same thing. Or when you watch Planet of the Apes, the an ape riding a horse. That's not funny, that's unsettling, that's terrifying. Yeah, that is the funniest thing ever you've ever said, Yes, it is. Um. So man, that was a good setup. Thanks man, It's been a while since we've gotten an old Josh story. I get really excited about anthropology. Uh, well, we are covering um domestication, and I guess we should

say off the bat that not everyone is on board. Um. Peter had to look this up because I wasn't sure what their actual stance was regarding animal domestication. You had to look that up. No about pets, sure, I wondered. Um, officially they are against pet keeping, but they they know it's too late. They hate pets, but they know it's too late. They're like, well, we know we're not. What they are not for is for setting these animals free. Here's why. The original co founder, I think UM is

Ingrid new Kirk is an animal abolitionist. But Pete is like, it's way too far gone. We don't want you to set these animals free, So we're going to fight our fight on spaying and neutering and reducing that population is much as possible. But they are still officially against pets.

But their position actually does make sense. It's extremely realistic because there is a strict definition of a domesticated animal, and domesticated animal is a is a species that was formerly wild that has been taken in by humans and whose characteristics have been so all ser radically altered by humans that they can no longer feed themselves. Typically, Yeah, it's it's when we actually change their genetic makeup. Yes, And part of that change, part of the characteristic changes

that the food supply is controlled by humans. So if you put say an average dog out, my dog luckily would be dead in three days. Yeah, And somebody say, well they would forage through garbage humanity. If you took a dog out of any kind of human area and put it in the area, it may return to a primal state, in which case that dog is reverted to a feral state. Now, a feral animal is one that was formally domesticated and then went back to the wild.

If you take a single wolf and you teach it to jump up and grab beef jerky out of your hands, what you have there, because that's a tame wolf. Now, tame wolf could still go fend for itself. It's a it's a tame individual. A domesticated animal is one that's born comfortable associating with humans. Yeah, And there's exceptions of course. Cats, the domestic house cat being one. You could drop a cat out in the middle of the woods and they

would survive. They would hunt mice and eat mice or whatever, squirrels, um. So the and the domestic cat is its own species. But that raises some questions under Jared Diamonds definition, the stricter definition of a domestic animal. If if a cat can just go like take care of itself, is it technically feral or is it ever really domesticated? Yeah? Or is it just an agreement, Hey, I'll catch the mice in your house and I like that wet food every day at five pm. So I'll just hang out here

and I like to sleep under your chin. Like the cat, the cat is found an agreeable arrangement that it could take or leave at any time. Yeah, mutually beneficial. As we'll see that. That's a consistent thing in the domestication of animals, is that, uh, some people believe that it's good for the animal, it's good for the human. And we have learned to uh scratch each other's backs in

many different ways literally even in some cases. So a little bit of a good background for this one might be to listen to our show on natural selection, because, um, well it covers natural selection, but there's another kind of selection called artificial selection when it comes to domesticating animals, and that is not the same thing. That is when humans are choosing these desirable traits and making it so through breeding. Um, like the the original horses, the first

domesticated horses were they smoked cigars. They did. We broke them of that have now there were small like ponies. There were little ones, a little wild horses in Mongolia. I think they call him the Zewalski's a family in Pittsburgh. No, it was a Russian Army officer that they're named after. But when you start your name with three consonants, I never know which one is silent. Okay, so how do you spell it? P r z oh. I was not gonna guess that's w all Ski so I'm just gonna

say z Wolski's horse. But um, people were at one point were like, man, I'd love to ride that thing, but he's too small. So find the biggest one that's a male, and find the biggest one that's a female. Make them go have sex, and maybe they'll have a bigger one, bigger son, and then make that one mate

with someone big. And eventually these things are going to be big enough to where we can ride them, and then by proxy throw away the ones that don't fit the criteria that we want or use them for something else. Sure food. But that's what we did with dogs too. Like you got a bunch of different ones, right, say, big, small, soft, furry, um, fast, cuddly, and we we said, well, we like this one for this, and we like that one for that, and so artificial

selection was still going on. We were just spreading it out all over the place. With like say a horse or something. We wanted bigger and stronger because we wanted to ride them. Uh, and we also wanted to apparently drink their milk, which I did not know. But it makes sense that horses produced milk because their mammals. But apparently our ancestors used to drink horse milk. You never had horse milk, no, I and I want to know if there's anyone out there listening who's tasted horse milk,

please describe it. Did someone out there is drinking horse milk right now while they're listening to the show. One of our Mongolian listening straight from the teat. I think they're like, they used the horse for all sorts of stuff. The Mongolians. They're also like excellent riders. Yeah. I think that that Zawolski's horses is in Mongolia again, Yeah, after being nearly extinct. I might be wrong about that. So um. In addition to selecting the big horse, we also did

some cool stuff with sheep. We um we selected out there they had um, longer, coarser hair that we didn't want. That's the camp. We wanted the softer stuff that was inside a k a the wool, So we bred sheep that had more wool than kemp until basically you can't find kemp in sheep any longer. And they were one

of the first domesticated animals, right the sheep. Yet they were um chickens uh don't normally produce eggs as frequently as as they do uh once they've been domesticated, and like a Rhode Island red will produce five to seven a week. That's a lot of eggs. Yeah, apparently the original chicken too. I didn't look this up, but I remember a friend of mine that was a vegetarian. I witnessed an argument between the vegetarian and mediate, which is

always fun because I don't get involved in that stuff. Um, and I think when I was like, well, look at the chickens. You know what else are they gonna do? You know what are they good for? And he was like, dude, the original chicken wasn't anything like this chicken. The original wild chicken was like taller and leaner and ran super fast and road runner. I guess, yeah, I guess, solve crimes and and did all sorts of chicken e things that weren't just being slaughtered for food. And apparently the

first chickens were domesticated. They think for um cock fighting, Yeah, for entertainment. Yeah, crazy. We have a shameful, shapeful history, don't we as people humans? Yeah? So Diamond, Um, you you would think, if we can domesticate animals, why don't we just domesticate them all and use them for purposes? Uh? And Diamond rites that only about fourteen animal species out of a hundred and forty eight cannets have been domesticated,

and that's because we can't domesticate every animal. There's certain things, certain criteria that even opens up the possibility. Yeah, there's like a six point checklist basically, and it's not progressive. If any one of these with these characteristics or traits isn't matt, Yeah, it pretty much just throws off the whole deal. So you gotta have all six, all right? Those six are the first. One is the right diet if you're a picky animal like, um, what's what's the

one that only eats bamboo? The bamboo toad? Those dumb the um koalas koalas now they eucalyptus. And yeah, man, I'm glad you remember that. Yeah, you're not gonna be able to domesticate a koala because what you want is something that you can feed in mass quantities on cheap accessible food. Oh well, actually bamboo would be the way to go. It's eucalyptus. Yeah, I don't know how eucalyptus

because if they bamboo, they'd probably be domesticated in that. Well. No, by cheap accessible food, I think they mean like millions of pounds of feed that you can put in a trough to Bamboo is like one of the fastest growing plants on Earth. Not I realize that I've got it still talking about eucalyptus, but it's eucalyptic. But this bamboo thing. Have you heard about bamboo? You know, I have a company that grows oh, Josh's Bamboo floors. The number two

thing is a fast growth rate. So um yeah, they gotta you know, be able to grow quick and so you can use them. Yeah. So, like if we'd figured out how to use gorillas to build skyscrapers, that'd be all him. But it would take forever to build a skyscraper because gorilla is only reproduced fairly and frequently. Okay, so we need something that can build a skyscraper fast. And that's why that didn't work when they tried it. Yeah, but that one gorilla wearing that hard hat a lot

of laughs. Uh, friendly disposition. Um, that's pretty clear. If you're a Kodiak bear, you're not going to be domesticated. They tried that. They tried grizzlies at one point. That's a failed domestication. Yeah. Um. Zebras very famously can't be domesticated. Yeah, because I imagine people would be like, man, I want to ride that thing. It's cool looking. Yeah, and it'll bite you to death. Really. Yeah. Apparently in that Jared Diamond article, he says that zookeepers zebras account for more

injuries to zookeepers than any other animal at the zoo. Man, Yeah, that is one piste off stripy horse. They're not horses at all, though, are they? They're related for sure, But the um so the zebras one and then koal is too apparently are like ferocious little animals eat while that they're try to eat in bamboo. Em right, um one

to three four, easy breeding, Yeah, that's pretty obvious. You gotta be able to pump out little baby puppies quickly, yes, because some animals like just shut down when you when they're captive, like they don't breed like pandas have a lot of trouble breeding and captivity cheetahs too. Is that why it's always such a big deal when they're born at the zoo or when like twins are born, like at the Atlanta Zoo. Oh yeah, Man, I don't know about zoos. Well, we did a podcast on that. I

think that's the conclusion we came to. Huh. I think that was the title of it. Man, I don't know about zoosh. What does he call her? Zoo's good or bad for animals? Yeah, that was a good episode. Yeah, that's one of those long lost, overlooked ones that are so good. That's polarizing to man. I did some Facebook posting about killer whales and captivity and people really feel passionately about like Blackfish, about supporting Sea World or not supporting Sea World. Um, and that black Fish is a

bunch of bunk. And apparently Blackfishes was highly manipulated. The documentary was. But at the end of all of that, I was like, I don't care. I just don't think they should be kept in captivity this one particular thing. Um. But that was just me respect of a social hierarchy. That's a big one because if you don't, if you can't be the alpha dog and the leader of the pack,

then you're gonna have a very hard time domesticating that animal. Yeah, but with a cat being an exception, an animal um that does follow a social hierarchy is basically pre arranged to be domesticated because you just take that alpha male, you punch him in the face a couple of times in front of everybody, make them cry, and then now you're the alpha male and you say start laying eggs, and they listened to you, and then they're domesticated at

least in that respect, after you've punched the chicken. Yeah, but that's a that's a big one. Is with that social hierarchy, it sets them up there predisposed to our method of domestication, which is listening to humans. And like sheep, it's mind blowing because sheep there herd animal that follows an alpha leader. Right. Yeah, and so we have gotten so we're just show offs when it comes to animal domestication.

We're so good that we've taken one of our domesticated animals, the dog, and put the dog in as the alpha male of the sheep. Yeah, that's how sheep are hurted. That's that's just showing off the aliens. That's another good alien laugh. Well, the double domestications and the dog leading the sheep. Um. And it's funny too if you've ever had a dog that's a hurting has the hurting instinct when you see that play out in your own home. Uh, we used to see it all the time with Lucy.

She would totally hurt us, and when we let her out in the backyard, she would walk the perimeter of the fence, you know, instead of running through the middle of it. Very interesting stuff to that original those original tendencies. Uh. And then the last one is they want panic. Um. If you have an animal that freaks out behind defence, de yeah, it's it's uh that you're gonna have a real hard time there. But like we said, there are exceptions because wolves were fierce and cats uh don't follow

a pack leader. Um. And we're gonna get to dogs and cats a little later. So if you listen to our show on Cave Art, you know that. And on Egyptology, you know the animals Mama vacation, Yeah probably, so you know the animals have been tied to humans for a long time and revered by humans for a long time, as evidenced by the fact that they buried them and they mummified them, and they painted them on their walls, painted pictures of us riding them. Yeah yeah, um yeah.

They they think that the um the first animal to be domesticated by far was the dog. How awesome is that hunter gatherer society was and the dog were pals long before agriculture ever came along. But about the time of the agricultural revolution, which is and get this, check this out, uh, ten thousand, five hundred years BP to about forty five hundred years BP. Now what's before present? Is that the new one? Yeah, that's like the scientific way of saying, there's no like zero year or anything

like that. It's just ten thou five hundred years before present, the full present, before present. Not British, that was New Zealand. Uh So basically, at some point about ten thousand five years ago, what they think happened is the Earth's climate changed. Um, maybe we killed off enough of the mega fauna through over hunting or through climate change they just went extinct.

And um, about that time, some plants came around that we noticed we really liked and maybe accidentally, we started growing them and then we figured out that we could just select these ones, and through a process of artificial and natural selection merged together, we got agriculture. And about that same time we started to domesticate pigs, sheep, and cattle. I think we're the big first three and they still are the big three, Like those are the money domesticated animals,

you know. Well, yeah, and like you said, it's tied to human natural selection as well, because if you are the tribe that has figured out how to keep cattle, then you're going to do better than your neighboring tribe that hasn't yet. And so you are going to be

more successful as a civilization. Yeah, you are, and you're going to conquer like we talked about and I think the Royalty one when we talked a lot about UM tribes conquering other tribes through agriculture, through exporting agriculture and um as a result. Jared Diamond points out eight percent of humans alive today speak one of seven language families and they come from two places in Eurasia, which were the first places for agriculture to take group. So basically

those tribes were so effective because of agriculture. Today we still basically the vast majority of speak one of seven language groups. That's crazy years, all these thousands of years later, that's how effective agriculture was, it, asserting Authorida, we should do one on agriculture, the birth of agriculture. I can't believe we haven't it. Yeah, let's do it, agreed. So back to animals. Uh, here's a little breakdown of where

some of your favorite animals came from. So in Southeast Asia's where you uh first got your goats, pick pigs, sheep and dogs. Southwest Asia. Yeah, we've gone over to Central it's like Mesopotamia. Okay, these are the birth of it all. Yes, um, Central Asia, you're gonna get your chickens and you're too humped bactry in sadlets pronounced Yeah, it looks like camel Central Asia. Yeah. And those camels were actually, um, well known for long hair and they

can survive in cold climates. Yes, and they're not just desert dwellers right. No. Apparently when they were domesticated, it created such a revolution that some societies stopped using the wheel because they're like, we don't need the wheel anymore. We got camels. Like the wheel left all together and then came back when someone said, uh, cars are pretty cool too. Yeah, actually as much sooner than that. Um. Arabia is where you have the Arabian camel with a

single hump. Um China they domesticated pigs and the water buffalo and dogs. Move over to the Ukraine and you've got the wild Tarpaan horses and uh so what most folks think are the original um, the original the o g the original horse, even though I read about the small ones of Mongolia the Yeah it was new Ski or the Kowalskie. Um. Yeah, I'm gonna have to look that up. And then Egypt you've got your donkeys, and then South America you've got your lama and your alpaca.

Lama as a beast of burden in the alpaca for their soft wool, and the guinea pig for their meat. Really yeah in South America, Yeah, the andies. I don't want to eat a guinea pig. That's what they were britt for. Ariginally wow. Um and those were some of the earliest ones in Jared Diamond. Again, I know I keep sighting them, but man, this guy's great ideas. Yeah, Okay, so he's he's a modern man. Yeah, he's got a little beat nick pointy beard and everything. Yeah, he's a

good guy. Let's get in touch with him. Okay, attention Jared Diamond, please contact us for reasons we'll figure out later. Yeah, stuff podcast at how Stuff works. Put in the subject line I'm Jared Diamond, and now we're gonna get five. It'll be lou Bega posing as Jared Diamond. Um So, Diamond pointed out that over the last thousand years, only one substantial animal has been added to the list of domesticated animals. So basically we were good at it to start,

and we did everything we could. Basically almost all animal holes that are going to be domesticated on Earth have been domestically the hamster, it was the reindeer. Oh, the hamster would until yes, I know. And if you read that, that's technically a tamed animal. Oh, it's not domesticated, not under the strictest definition, where it's like the animals are born in their genetically, they're comfortable around humans, are born that way. With it, with a tamed animal, you're like

inventing the wheel with each individual organism. With this, with a domesticated animal. You've taken a wild species and you've selected it enough so that when an animal is born, it's cool being around a human, Whereas like if you're around like a gerbil or a hamster baby, it's not

gonna be cool around you. It doesn't have, you know, thousands of years of genetic information telling it that from birth it can be comfortable with you because you're gonna give it some pellets to eat, okay, Whereas a dog, a puppy will just automatically snuggle up with you, right, But think about getting close to a wolf pup. It's gonna be problematic. M let's go try right now. Jever see that movie Never Cry Wolf, the Disney movie from like the mid eighties. It was so good. It wasn't

it was live action. No, it was way before his time. No, no no, no, I totally know what you mean. I can picture the guy in my head. He like goes and lives with the wolf by himself. Man, that's a good movie. Yeah, he was in I can't remember. He's in another movie. So when when we did domesticated, like I said, we we took a wild animal, underwent a process through artificial selection to where it just became something different.

And there's certain traits that they're not quite sure how they happen, but they're clearly linked to the genes that lead to domestication, that take an animal and turn it from wild to tame to domesticated. Um, and that have outward signals and signs like floppy ears. Yeah. Um. The only other animal in the wild that has floppy years is the African elephant. Every other animal in the wild

has perky years. But it's almost like it's a signal like, Okay, we're tame now, our ears don't need to perk up. It totally is smaller brain size, Yep. They don't need to be as smart um over the years if you're feeding. As evidenced by my dumb dog Buckley, like I said,

he wouldn't survive two days in the wild. Um. My neighbor one time left his dog out all night by accident, and I was going out to the car the next morning and this big rottweiler comes running over at me, and I was like At first, I was like, oh man, and then I realized it was Carter, and uh. I went and banged on his door and he finally woke up and he was like, Carter's in here. I was like,

I don't think so. And he had come home from a long night let him out and forgot to let back in a little Carter just slept on the front porch like the sweetest thing ever. But Carter survived, is my point. But sleeping on the front by sleeping on the foot porch and being like scratching on it like please let me in. Um so yeah, smaller brains, uh, curly hair, um, sharp sense of sight and hearing. Um,

well it's lessoned. Yeah, it's lesson because they don't need that stuff either, right, because they're being cared for by humans. The humans are saying, you just get dumb or in charge. Now we'll we'll teach everything you need to know. Um. We got a lot of this data, this information from a Jared Diamond very no, not even a very famous study that went on for about forty years um by

a Russian geneticist named Dmitri Balleyev. And ballete said, Hey, I'm going to figure out how domestication actually works, and I'm gonna take um silver foxes and I'm going to compress the domestication process and basically, over the course of like thirty or forty years. Even after he died, his UM his colleagues and UM interns and assistance carried on this experiment. So it's been going on for maybe fifty years. And UM they've found that you can get predictable results

from domesticating animals. And they've domesticated some silver foxes. Um, their ears started getting floppy, their skulls started to get smaller, they started to get curly hair, some of them started to bark, um, and they were born comfortable around humans. Yeah, and here's the thing, um, if you've seen there's a really cute video on the internet about a little fox getting his belly rubbed, it looks sort of like dogs,

but they are DNA evidence. They have pretty much proven that dogs are descended from the Asian gray wolf and have nothing to do with foxes. But um, that's just proof through this experiment that taming and domesticating this animal can lead to these traits. Yeah, because a lot of people are like, how do you get a Pomeranian from a gray wolf? From hug from a gray wolf or

something like that. Have you seen that picture of that pug who's um, who is clearly messing around with a crawfish and gets his tongue bit and it's like in mid air, and you know they have huge eyes that are bulging out. Anyway, he's trying to like have sex with the crawfis no, no, Like he was sniffing it and just the crawfish like grabbed onto his tongue and now the crawfish is hanging onto his tongue in mid air.

Is the pugs like squealing or Whatever's hilarious anyway? Um, they they figured out that because of domestication, these traits change, and like I said before, with you know, different kinds of dogs, you get different kinds of well, different looking dogs that we've selected for over time. Yeah, and it didn't take that long apparently. Um, Apparently with canine specifically selected breeding can affect the species really rapidly. And um, there's been evidence of Pekinese dogs as far back as

first century a d. China. So, um, they weren't wolves for long once we decided. And you know, there's different theories on how that very first happened. Um. One of them, which I like, is that people found abandoned pups and it's just a natural human instinct to see a little puppy and care for it. So they said, well, let me take this little wolf puppy because it needs a home. We should talk about the science of cute sometime. It's really interesting an email the other day. We'll have to

do that one. Um. So yeah, that's one of the theories. The other one is that, um, maybe some of the more tame wolves would rummage around our garbage and for food, and so if you were a more tame wolf, you're more likely to survive, and eventually that would evolve into a more dog like species. Yeah, because you're the human garbage pile was much more reliable source of food than say,

like whatever was growing in the wild. So exactly, they would be that's natural selection basically through artificial means almost yeah, um. But either way, they think that dogs descended from wolves or dive verged from wolves as long as a hundred thousand years ago, but they didn't really start to undergo

the drastic morphological changes until maybe fifteen thousand years ago. Um. And again all of this predates the advent of agriculture, so that means that hunter gatherers and dogs were friends for a while. And they think that the reason that happened was because they figured out that a dog could go flush out some corry, a hunter gatherer could spirit and then tear off a piece and give the dog

some and eat some himself. And they had a symbiotic hunting relationship that was aces Yeah, like we said earlier, mutually beneficial. It was great for the dog. They were fast and fierce, and we were smart and uh, because we already mentioned dogs are are innately want to follow a lead dog, an alpha dog. It just it was kind of like the perfect relationship and it has been ever since. Yeah. And one of the other cool things about the domestication of the dog is they in ancient Rome,

apparently women. That's where they had the first evidence of little lap doggies because they were supposedly cured stomach aches, which of course they didn't. But I think it just made someone feel better having a little dog curled up on their lap. So how's your tummy feel? Now? We selected them for that, So we selected them for that. We selected um, oh, I don't know, sheep dogs to herd and terriers to catch rats. And you know that that explains all this variation in dog breeds. Yeah, I

saw a cold special on it the other day. It was on I think it was on Animal Planet, but it wasn't one of those just like look how cute everything is. It was kind of like the science behind the history of these animals. It was really cool. So let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about cats and other stuff too right after this.

So okay, So cats don't follow in alpha male, which leads to a puzzle of how they could possibly have been domesticated, and if you talk to certain people, they may not have ever really been domesticated. Cats don't look different than their their ancestors, right, which means that it makes it tough to go back and compare modern cats to the cats and the fossil record and say, oh, they diverged X number of years ago or whatever. Yeah.

That's one of my favorite things about cats is when you look at a cat in the backyard, you know, crouched down to leap on the bird, it looks just like a big lion about to leap on the big bird. The thing is, they're pretty sure that cats did not

diverge from big cats like lions. They think they came instead from a couple of different wildcats a European wildcat and an African wildcat, and both of those are still around today, and they think that that's what the cats last common ancestors were, or if you look like it, yeah, like if you look at the African wildcat, looks like

just a bigger version of a dabby. Yes, And they don't know exactly when they were domesticated, but there's evidence that as far back as um years ago there's at least one grave site where a cat was clearly buried with the human, which indicates some sort of importance and um, familial nous with a cat. And they love cats and dogs, and I think cats were even had like a religious significance, but or maybe both of them did. But because Anubis that was the dog, right, I don't remember. I just

remember Horace was the hawk, right right. But ancient Egyptians love their dogs and cats. It was Horace the dog. I think Anubis was the dog. So um again, cats probably are not technically domesticated, but um well, the reason why we we took them in though, is the same reason that some people still take them in now is because they're good mousers. And that's pretty much the explanation for domestication in a lot of ways. Like they animals

were useful for work, that's right. Um, so some of the other animals, very ancient domesticated animals that we domesticated for work, and I guess I should say it wasn't just for work. Probably initially we domesticated animals for a food supply, like their milk. Yeah. Um, things like cattle cows, we domesticated them for milk, of course. Yeah, they're ancient ancestor it's now extinct called the a rock and um, yeah, that's what led to modern tame cattle apparently, right. Um, Oxen,

we domesticated them for work. Although there's milk from them, you can pretty much drink milk from anything. Yeah, I think was you can milk anything right at just a little milking. Um. The ox I think was was even stronger than the cow. And they would pull initially sledges, like put a bunch of junk on that thing and pull it over here, and then eventually plows and of

course wheeled wagons and um. Some say that we wouldn't have even gotten to where we were with a wheel if it hadn't have been for things like ox Yeah, because we would have had to pull it. Yeah, that's no good. Um, cheap. We eventually figured out that we could breathe them for their wool, although apparently there was a five thousand year differential between the time we domesticated cheap in the time we started um using wool. Oh yeah,

before the loom, before they started weaving by hand. Goats. Goats are great because they'll eat anything. Um, so they're super useful. Um. You can be on infertile rocky land and a goat is pretty happy. They're great climbers. Uh, they eat them. Yeah, I got meat. Unfortunately, you can make cheese out of their milk. Yeah. Um, did you know that Kashmir comes from goats? Yeah, I do not know that. I did not know that. Um. I think they're just good for looking at and thinking are cute? Sure,

that's one thing. Uh. Pigs, of course are descended domesticated from the wild boar and um. Pigs were domesticated mainly because they would eat waste and trash, and so they were handy to have around because they would eat our trash and then we would eat them, right. And you know, it's interesting. North America has a pretty fascinating history as far as domesticated animals go. With pigs in particular, the

wild hogs in North America were not around. There are a couple of pig like animals, but there's no true wild pigs in North America, or there weren't until the sixteenth century when De Soto brought a bunch of domesticated pigs who wandered off, some of which wandered off and became the wild hogs of the America's Well, that's the same thing happened to the horse exactly. They originally came over on the bearing Land Bridge and then went extinct.

And then the Spanish brought them over and they said, hey, I don't know why they aren't horses here already, because this is pretty great. The horses said that, and some of them went feral. And now you have the horses on Cumberland Island. Yeah they're still wild, aren't they. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. They're faking it. Cumberland Island is here in Georgia. For those of you that don't know, we're not talking about some like South American country. No, Cumberland Island, Yeah,

right here in the South. Um. And you know it's cool is and for me this is the fact of the podcast. After the horse, the next step forward and speed transportation was five thousand years later with the steam traind years, horses were as fast as we could go and uh, you know, tie up twelve of them to that stage coach and we'll be twelve horses strong. But um, yeah, for five thousand years is just amazing. And then finally the invent of the steam engine, and the horses were like,

all right, fine, we'll go over here. But event apparently at first they were used for their meat and their milk. Yeah, horse milk again again, and then they were used as a mode of transportation. Um. Donkeys also good for transporting. Like we said in Egypt, you know they came out of Egypt. Camels give for transport, and you've got a

couple of different kinds, the Bactrian and the Arabian camels. Um, and the just using animals for transport and for work kind of allowed for not only the agricultural revolution to take hold, but for it to spread as well through trade routes and stuff that allowed humans to just move longer distances faster. So that was another big way that domestication changed humanity helped spread like a plague over the

face of your so we could ruin everything. Yeah, I guess we can talk about some other um, smaller livestock like chickens and roosters. Um, like you said earlier, this was I think maybe the second fact of the show is possibly domesticated for entertainment as cock fighters. Yeah, which is sad um turkeys. I didn't know this. They were the um one of the few indigenous North American domesticated animals. Yeah,

Mesoamericans domesticated them. Who knew. I didn't know that either, Although if that Fletcher boat you should read because stuff like that comes up. I just need to read both those at some point. I can't believe you haven't. I know. Here's another one. Bees. We domesticated bees. I'm sure through a very long and painful process. This is discussing four as well. Um. But so we domesticated bees, and we use bees to help us with another domesticated organism, the

almond tree. Oh yeah, so that's another one. That's like sheep, dogs hurting sheep. Oh yeah yeah, but this is bees pollinating almonds. Yeah. Well, bees, we did a great episode on that. That's how we um sweetened everything for many many years and still do using honey. But last night it's still delicious in a cocktail. No on a biscuit, Oh, nice little honey on a biscuit. Uh, did you make

the biscuit yourself? You did nice from scratch from the can? Yeah, okay, those are good though, Oh yeah, you know it's real good. I've noticed is the frozen ones in the bag instead of the can. They they rise a lot more like a traditional Southern biscuit to me, we wanted just like a nasty, buttery like layer biscuit. Yeah, the flaky layers. Man, those are good and it's always fun to open the package too, and it's delicious with honey. But thanks to a man named L. L. Lank Strath, he is the

guy who really made bee keeping. Uh. There are a lot of people working with frames already, but he's the one. He's the first guy that made removable and movable frames, which apparent only bees will have a tendency to uh tie their honey combs into the wall of the box, let's say. And um, with those removable and movable frames, they weren't I couldn't do that anymore. And apparently that made it really easy to manage them. So thanks to him in eighteen fifty two, smart guy, we could uh

domesticate those bees for their delicious honey. And so here's where it comes. Um kind of falls apart from me. I could see saying bees are domesticated. They don't sting you, they're used to being around people. Yeah. Um, silkworms yeah no, no no. Uh, rabbits no. I would say that you can tame a rabbit, but for the most part, they're not domesticated. And then the same with hamsters, which I didn't realize that they were this recent, Yeah, from nineteen thirty.

And another fun fact is supposedly the entire population of domesticated or I'm sorry, tamed hamsters derives from that one hamster family because they make so many little hamsters so quickly. So you take issue with silkworms, rabbits, and hamsters, I do as tamed but not domesticated. Yes, like the elephant, Just because Hannibal rides an elephant doesn't mean it's domesticated. It meant he had a tamed elephant to ride and chuck. Just before we wrap up that, I mentioned that, uh,

humans in turn have been domesticated by agriculture. And we have like we've gone undergone a lot of the same changes that domesticated animals undergo when we domesticate them, Like our reproductive period has increased because we don't have to carry a kid like ten kilometers every day because we're not hunter gatherers, so we can have more kids. Just

get on the horse and ride all over town exactly. UM. And one of the other ways that we've changed, in addition to some of us becoming lactose tolerant into adulthood, is we've become um ravaged by and also immune to a lot of diseases, a lot of epidemic diseases which couldn't have ever existed prior to the advent of agriculture for two reasons. One, it needs a dense human population that agriculture supports for it to be spread around and

contracted and to really gain steam. And then secondly, it also requires a lot of repeated close proximity to animals. And it turns out that all of our epidemic diseases come from the agricultural revolution and are hanging out with livestock a lot like UM. For example, um influenza came from pigs and ducks um measles and tuberculosis came from cattle.

Possibly smallpox came from cattle, if not camels. And then get this, the very fact that all of these, almost all of these worst epidemic diseases have their origins in Eurasia mean that that's because our domestication took place in Eurasia, which means that the people of Eurasia were able to develop resistance and immunity over the generations to these diseases, so they don't get these diseases as much, you know, and when we came over, that's what wiped out the

North American New World populations because they didn't have any resistance to these diseases. So you can really make a case that agriculture changed everything more than anything else ever has. Wow, So that's that you got anything else. I've got nothing else, man,

you need to read. I'll do that tonight. Okay, if you want to know more about animal domestication, you can type those two seemingly boring but rather fascinating words into the search part house to work dot com and that will bring up this article and then sussistant search parts. Time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this Nielsen family. We heard from quite a few got quite a few people that showed pictures of their little like two and three dollar packets, which just kind of neat. I don't

think it's even five dollars anymore. I think a couple of people just got two dollars. Apparently they give you two to sweeten the pot, and then once you do it, you get more. That's what I think, all right, that's what somebody I think said, Well, this is from a real deal Nielsen family that got paid and they're from Atlanta, from Grant Park Um. Apparently our address was picked at random by their computer program, and they sent out a representative with a gift set of ugly tumblers to convince

us to participate. We agreed because they pay you about two hundred dollars every six months if you let them track your TV and computer usage. Rob, who was the representative, came by, installed the TV box and computer program, and we check in on us in person every six months and ask a set of questions about our life and purchasing habits. They always asked about table wine, which I

thought was interesting. Uh, I don't know. Every time we turned on our t they would have loved me because I would just be drunk on table wine the whole time. Every time we turn on the TV or opened up our laptop, we had to press a button about who was watching. Uh, and using the computer wasn't that hard, but it became annoying after a couple of years. So

we're happy when our contract ended. Apparently they were really excited to have us as a part of their program because we were what they call a Grand Slam family, which means we were young under thirty with over the air TV, no cable antenna, and we owned a Mac. So that's a Grand Slam apparently. Uh it seems yeah, I guess. So it seems like we were pretty rare fined in the world, in their world, so rare that when our two year participation ran out, they all offered

us a year long extension. We also got a bonus payment for being a minority household, which is hilarious because both of us are white as can be, but my husband is half Cuban. So that is from Laura and Chris right here in Atlanta. Nice Laura and Chris Nielsen. Yeah, the Nielsen family, no cable under thirty Mac users, the Grand Slam Grand Slam. If you are a Grand Slam family of some weird sort, we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at s y s K podcast.

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