September 25, 2014 • 49 mins
It's strange to hear, but the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, including the domestication of wild animals, is the single biggest thing to ever happen to humanity. You can thank it for everything from kingdoms to Ebola.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you Stuff you should know from house Stuff
Works dot com. 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. How's it going fine? Why are you guys?
(00:27):
That's just friendly icebreaker? Oh I see. Yeah, as if
we didn't just record it, uther Jack, we did. It
was on police and turkeys, right, so, Chuck, Yes, you've
heard of Jared Diamond before, right, No rang familiar, Guns,
(00:48):
Germs and Steel. Okay, yeah, 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. 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
(01:10):
to agriculture. I was going to guess on what that
might be. Oh, sorry, what 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 races. 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
(01:33):
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,
(01:54):
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.
(02:16):
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
(02:41):
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. They kind
of went hand in hand and hoof and hand, which
to me is hilarious because consider this, I think this
(03:04):
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 a 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
(03:26):
another 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, 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 an ape riding
a horse. That sound funny, that's unsettling, it's terrifying. Yeah,
(03:50):
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 in
all 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.
(04:12):
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
(04:34):
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 pet is like,
it's way too far gone. We don't want you to
set these animals free. So we're gonna fight our fight
on spaying and neutering and reducing that population is much
as possible. But they are still officially against pets. But
(04:58):
their position actually does make sense as a 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
(05:21):
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
(05:42):
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,
ferial animal is one that was formerly domesticated and then
(06:04):
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,
(06:29):
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
(06:49):
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? 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
(07:11):
like to sleep under your chin. Like the cat. The
cat has found an agreeable arrangement that it could take
or leave in 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 scratch each other's backs in many different ways
(07:33):
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
(07:54):
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.
Now they were small like ponies. There were little ones,
a little wild horses in Mongolia. I think they call
him the Zewalski's not a family in Pittsburgh. No, it
(08:19):
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 guess
that's e w Alski. So I'm just gonna say z
Wolski's horse. But um, people were at one point like, man,
I'd love to ride that thing, but he's too small.
(08:40):
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
(09:01):
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
(09:23):
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, And I want to know if
there's anyone out there listening who's tasted horse milk, please
(09:44):
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 teeth. 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
ze Wolsky horses is in Mongolia again, Yeah, after being
(10:04):
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 camp. Yeah, we wanted the softer stuff that
was inside a k a. The wool. So we bread
(10:24):
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 ll produced five to
(10:45):
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 a 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,
(11:06):
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 uh, and did all sorts of chickeny things
that weren't just being slaughtered for food. And apparently the
first chickens were domesticated. They think for um, cock fighting, Yeah,
(11:30):
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 candidates have been domesticated,
(11:51):
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 treats
isn't Matt, Yeah, it pretty much just throws off the
whole deal. So you gotta have all six, all right?
(12:13):
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 to those dumb,
dumb koalas koalas, Now they eucalyptus. A man, I'm glad
you remember that. Yeah, you're not gonna be able to
(12:34):
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
(12:54):
of pounds of feed that you can put in a trough. Dude.
Bamboo is like one of the fastest growing plants on Earth.
Not lots that are still talking about ecous, but 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,
(13:16):
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 awesome, 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,
(13:39):
but that one gorilla wearing that hard hat got 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,
(14:02):
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
(14:24):
at all, though, are they They're related for sure, but
the um so the zebras one and then koala is
too apparently are like ferocious little animals eat while they
they're tied to eat in bamboo, right, um one to
three four? Easy breeding, Yeah, that's pretty obvious. You gotta
(14:45):
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 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, man, I don't know about zoos. Well,
(15:09):
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 zoos. 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. They are so good. That's polarizing
to man. I did some Facebook posting about killer whales
in captivity, and people really feel passionately about like Blackfish
(15:33):
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,
(15:57):
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 and
punch him in the face a couple of times in
front of everybody, make them cry, and then now you're
(16:19):
the alpha male and you say start laying eggs and
they listen 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
(16:41):
blowing because sheep, they're herd animal that follows an alpha leader, right,
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 they for mail of the sheep. Yeah,
(17:01):
that's how sheep are herded. 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
(17:23):
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,
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 like dear, Yeah, it's
it's uh that you're gonna have a real hard time there.
(17:44):
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,
but first, right after this break, we're gonna talk a
little bit about the history of domestication. Chuck. You know
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(18:06):
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(18:27):
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(19:10):
off that first purchase. That's right. So go to squarespace
dot com slash stuff right now. So if you listen
to our show on cave Art, you know that. And
on Egyptology, you know the animals mummification, Yeah probably, so
you know, the animals have been tied to humans for
(19:33):
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 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
(19:56):
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 hundred years BP before present. Is that
the one. Yeah, that's like the scientific way of saying,
(20:18):
there's no like zero year or anything like that. It's
just ten years before present, the full before present. Not British,
that was New Zealand. Uh So basically, at some point
about ten thousand, five hundred years ago, what they think
(20:38):
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
(20:59):
one 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,
(21:20):
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 gonna 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. We talked a lot
(21:41):
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 places for agriculture to take group. So
(22:02):
basically those tribes were so effective because of agriculture. Today
we still basically the vast majority to speak one of
seven language groups. That's crazy. Here's all these thousands of
years later, that's how effective agriculture was. It, asserting Authorida,
(22:23):
we should do one on agriculture, the Birth of agriculture.
I can't believe we haven't yet. 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,
(22:45):
sheep and dogs. Southwest Asia. Yeah, we went over to
Central it's like Mesopotamia. Okay, these are the birth of
it all. Yes, um, Centraliser, you're gonna get your chickens
and you're too humped bactry in sablets pronounced yeah, it
looks like camel Central Asia. Yeah. And those camels were
(23:07):
actually um well known for long hair and they can
survive in cold climates. Yes, and they're not just desert
dwellers right. And 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,
(23:32):
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 that's what most folks think are the original.
(23:53):
Um the original the o g the original horse, even
though I read about the small ones in Mongolia. Yeah,
the Yeah, it was new ski here the h 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
(24:13):
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 any pig. That's
what they were britt for originally. Wow. Um. And those
were some of the earliest ones in Jared Diamond again,
(24:36):
I know I keep sighting, but man, this guy's great ideas.
Is he live? 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 them. Okay,
attention Jared Diamond, please contact us for reasons we'll figure
out later. Yeah, stuff podcast at how stuff works. Put
(24:57):
in the subject line, I'm Jared Diamond, bigative. 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.
(25:20):
So basically we were good at it to start and
we did everything we could. Basically, almost all animals that
are going to be domesticated on Earth have been domestically.
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,
(25:44):
where it's like the animals are born in their genetically
more comfortable around humans are born that way. With it.
With a tamed animal, you're like inventing the wheel with
each individual organism with us. With a domesticated animal, you've
taken a wild PCs and you've selected it enough so
that when an animal is born, it's cool being around
(26:06):
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
(26:27):
with you, right, But think about getting close to a
wolf pup. It's gonna be problematic. M let's go try
right now. Do you ever see that movie Never Cry Wolf,
the Disney movie from like the mid eighties. It was
so good. It wasn't he was live action. No, it
was way before his time. No, no no, no, I totally
(26:48):
know what you mean. I can picture the guy in
my head. He like goes and lives with the wolf Man.
That's a good movie. Yeah, he was in I can't remember.
He's in another movie. So when when we did Domestic,
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
(27:11):
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 years. Um.
The only other animal in the wild that has floppy
(27:33):
years is the African elephant. Every other animal in the
wild has perky ears, 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. 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.
(27:56):
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
(28:18):
to let it 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 front 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
(28:42):
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. Yeah, well 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
(29:03):
about forty years UM by a Russian geneticist named Dmitri Balleyev.
And Balete 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
(29:24):
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,
(29:45):
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 little fox getting his belly rubbed, it looks
sort of like dogs, but they are DNA evidence. They
(30:05):
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 at
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? Pug from a
gray wolf or something like that. Have you seen that
(30:27):
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 bolting out. Anyway, he's trying to
like have sex with the c no know, 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
(30:49):
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.
(31:12):
Apparently with canine specifically, selective 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
(31:35):
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 and 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
(31:58):
of the more tame wolves rummage around our garbage and
for food, and so if you were a more tamele,
if you're more likely to survive, 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
(32:21):
almost um. But either way, they think that dogs descended
from wolves or diverged 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.
(32:43):
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 quarry, 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,
(33:04):
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
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
(33:26):
of the dog is they in ancient Rome, apparently women
is 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 growed 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,
(33:49):
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.
(34:10):
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. Okay, so cats don't follow
in alpha male, which leads to a puzzle of how
(34:31):
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
(34:51):
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 line in about the 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,
(35:11):
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 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 um domesticated, but there's
(35:32):
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. They love cats
and dogs, right, and I think cats were even had
(35:53):
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 I knew us was the dog.
So um again, cats probably are not technically domesticated, but
(36:22):
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
(36:45):
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. 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
(37:08):
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,
a little, 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
(37:33):
on that thing and pull it over here, and then
eventually plows and the force wheel wagons. And some say
that we wouldn't have even gotten to where we were
with the 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 breed them for their wool, although apparently there
(37:54):
was a five thousand year differential between the time we
domesticated cheap and the time we started um using wool.
Oh yeah, yeah, before the loom, before they started weaving
by hand. Goats. Goats were great because they'll eat anything. Um,
so they're super useful. Um. You can be on infertile
(38:17):
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, yeah, I did
not know that. Um. I think they're just good for
looking at and thinking they're cute. That's one thing. H Pigs,
(38:37):
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.
You know. It's interesting. North America has a pretty fascinating
history as far as domesticated animals go. We pigs, in particular,
(39:02):
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
(39:23):
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
(39:47):
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 train.
(40:12):
D 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 following
the invented the steam engine, and the horses were like,
all right, fine, we'll go over here. But then apparently
(40:33):
at first they were used for their meat and their milk, yeah,
horse milk again. And then they were used as a
mode of transportation. UM. Donkeys also good for transporting in Egypt.
They came out of Egypt. Camels good for transport, And
you've got a couple of different kinds, the Bactrian and
the Arabian camels. UM, and the just using animals for
(40:57):
transport and for work kind 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 you can ruin everything. Yeah,
(41:20):
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 uh. Turkeys. I didn't know this. They
were the um one of the few indigenous North American
(41:43):
domesticated animals. Yeah, Mesoamericans domesticated them. Who knew? I didn't
know that either. Although if that Fletcher boat you should
read four 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.
(42:04):
This is discussing 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
(42:24):
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 on the other biscuit. Uh,
did you make the biscuit yourself? You we did nice
from scratch from the can. Yeah, okay, those are good though.
(42:46):
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,
(43:06):
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
apparently bees will have a tendency to uh tie their
honeycombs into the wall of the box, let's say, and um,
(43:30):
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 can see saying bees
(43:52):
are domesticated. They don't sting you, they're used to being
around people. Yeah. Um, silkworms yeah 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
(44:16):
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 as tamed but not domesticated. Yes,
like the elephant, just because Hannibal rides an elephant doesn't
(44:39):
mean it's domesticated. It meant he had a tamed elephant
to ride and chuck. Just before we wrap up, 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 increas east because we don't
(45:02):
have to carry a kid like ten kilometers every day
because we're not hunter gatherers, so we can have more
kids on the horse and 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,
(45:25):
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
(45:48):
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
(46:11):
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,
(46:34):
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. So that's that you
got anything else. I've got nothing else, man, you need
to read that tonight. Okay, if you want to know
(46:59):
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 sinsistant 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
(47:19):
of their little like two and three dollar packets, which
is 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. Alright, 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
(47:41):
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
(48:03):
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. You know,
every time we turned on our two they would have
loved me because I would just be drunk on table
wine the whole time. Every time we turned on the
TV or opened up our laptop, we had to press
a button about who was watching. Uh. And using the
(48:24):
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. Uh,
and we owned a Mac. So that's a grand Slam apparently.
(48:49):
Uh it seems yeah, I guess. So it seems like
we're 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
(49:10):
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. You can join us on
(49:33):
Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You can
send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff
Works dot com and check out our home on the web,
Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works
dot com
Welcome to you Stuff you should know from house Stuff
Works dot com. 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. How's it going fine? Why are you guys?
(00:27):
That's just friendly icebreaker? Oh I see. Yeah, as if
we didn't just record it, uther Jack, we did. It
was on police and turkeys, right, so, Chuck, Yes, you've
heard of Jared Diamond before, right, No rang familiar, Guns,
(00:48):
Germs and Steel. Okay, yeah, 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. 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
(01:10):
to agriculture. I was going to guess on what that
might be. Oh, sorry, what 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 races. 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
(01:33):
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,
(01:54):
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.
(02:16):
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
(02:41):
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. They kind
of went hand in hand and hoof and hand, which
to me is hilarious because consider this, I think this
(03:04):
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 a 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
(03:26):
another 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, 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 an ape riding
a horse. That sound funny, that's unsettling, it's terrifying. Yeah,
(03:50):
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 in
all 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.
(04:12):
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
(04:34):
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 pet is like,
it's way too far gone. We don't want you to
set these animals free. So we're gonna fight our fight
on spaying and neutering and reducing that population is much
as possible. But they are still officially against pets. But
(04:58):
their position actually does make sense as a 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
(05:21):
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
(05:42):
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,
ferial animal is one that was formerly domesticated and then
(06:04):
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,
(06:29):
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
(06:49):
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? 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
(07:11):
like to sleep under your chin. Like the cat. The
cat has found an agreeable arrangement that it could take
or leave in 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 scratch each other's backs in many different ways
(07:33):
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
(07:54):
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.
Now they were small like ponies. There were little ones,
a little wild horses in Mongolia. I think they call
him the Zewalski's not a family in Pittsburgh. No, it
(08:19):
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 guess
that's e w Alski. So I'm just gonna say z
Wolski's horse. But um, people were at one point like, man,
I'd love to ride that thing, but he's too small.
(08:40):
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
(09:01):
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
(09:23):
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, And I want to know if
there's anyone out there listening who's tasted horse milk, please
(09:44):
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 teeth. 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
ze Wolsky horses is in Mongolia again, Yeah, after being
(10:04):
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 camp. Yeah, we wanted the softer stuff that
was inside a k a. The wool. So we bread
(10:24):
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 ll produced five to
(10:45):
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 a 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,
(11:06):
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 uh, and did all sorts of chickeny things
that weren't just being slaughtered for food. And apparently the
first chickens were domesticated. They think for um, cock fighting, Yeah,
(11:30):
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 candidates have been domesticated,
(11:51):
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 treats
isn't Matt, Yeah, it pretty much just throws off the
whole deal. So you gotta have all six, all right?
(12:13):
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 to those dumb,
dumb koalas koalas, Now they eucalyptus. A man, I'm glad
you remember that. Yeah, you're not gonna be able to
(12:34):
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
(12:54):
of pounds of feed that you can put in a trough. Dude.
Bamboo is like one of the fastest growing plants on Earth.
Not lots that are still talking about ecous, but 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,
(13:16):
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 awesome, 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,
(13:39):
but that one gorilla wearing that hard hat got 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,
(14:02):
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
(14:24):
at all, though, are they They're related for sure, but
the um so the zebras one and then koala is
too apparently are like ferocious little animals eat while they
they're tied to eat in bamboo, right, um one to
three four? Easy breeding, Yeah, that's pretty obvious. You gotta
(14:45):
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 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, man, I don't know about zoos. Well,
(15:09):
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 zoos. 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. They are so good. That's polarizing
to man. I did some Facebook posting about killer whales
in captivity, and people really feel passionately about like Blackfish
(15:33):
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,
(15:57):
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 and
punch him in the face a couple of times in
front of everybody, make them cry, and then now you're
(16:19):
the alpha male and you say start laying eggs and
they listen 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
(16:41):
blowing because sheep, they're herd animal that follows an alpha leader, right,
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 they for mail of the sheep. Yeah,
(17:01):
that's how sheep are herded. 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
(17:23):
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,
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 like dear, Yeah, it's
it's uh that you're gonna have a real hard time there.
(17:44):
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,
but first, right after this break, we're gonna talk a
little bit about the history of domestication. Chuck. You know
who makes a cool website? Uh? Yeah, you do if
(18:06):
you use squarespace dot com. That is absolutely right. And
squarespace is not only the great functional engine for making
the best websites you can possibly make. It's easy, it's intuitive.
It uses dragon drop for Pete's sake. That's right. You're
gonna have a beautiful, clean design. Your website is gonna
look super great. Your content basically is gonna become the
focus of your website, which is what everyone wants. Yeah,
(18:27):
and if you get jammed up, man, you just get
in touch with squar space. They have seven customer support
through email and live chat. That's right. And if you're
interested in selling some of your weares all plans have
commerce options, which is really cool. You can host an
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Makes it really handy to make a few bucks, and
your site looks good on every device. Plus you can
(18:49):
trial this risk free. Go to squares space dot com
slash stuff and because you know Chuck and Josh, you'll
get a fourteen day trial with no credit card necessary.
That's right. And if you like the service, it's gonna
cost us low as eight dollars a month and it's
gonna include a free domain name if you sign up
for a year. All you gotta do, once again is
use our offer code stuff and you'll get ten percent
(19:10):
off that first purchase. That's right. So go to squarespace
dot com slash stuff right now. So if you listen
to our show on cave Art, you know that. And
on Egyptology, you know the animals mummification, Yeah probably, so
you know, the animals have been tied to humans for
(19:33):
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 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
(19:56):
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 hundred years BP before present. Is that
the one. Yeah, that's like the scientific way of saying,
(20:18):
there's no like zero year or anything like that. It's
just ten years before present, the full before present. Not British,
that was New Zealand. Uh So basically, at some point
about ten thousand, five hundred years ago, what they think
(20:38):
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
(20:59):
one 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,
(21:20):
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 gonna 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. We talked a lot
(21:41):
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 places for agriculture to take group. So
(22:02):
basically those tribes were so effective because of agriculture. Today
we still basically the vast majority to speak one of
seven language groups. That's crazy. Here's all these thousands of
years later, that's how effective agriculture was. It, asserting Authorida,
(22:23):
we should do one on agriculture, the Birth of agriculture.
I can't believe we haven't yet. 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,
(22:45):
sheep and dogs. Southwest Asia. Yeah, we went over to
Central it's like Mesopotamia. Okay, these are the birth of
it all. Yes, um, Centraliser, you're gonna get your chickens
and you're too humped bactry in sablets pronounced yeah, it
looks like camel Central Asia. Yeah. And those camels were
(23:07):
actually um well known for long hair and they can
survive in cold climates. Yes, and they're not just desert
dwellers right. And 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,
(23:32):
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 that's what most folks think are the original.
(23:53):
Um the original the o g the original horse, even
though I read about the small ones in Mongolia. Yeah,
the Yeah, it was new ski here the h 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
(24:13):
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 any pig. That's
what they were britt for originally. Wow. Um. And those
were some of the earliest ones in Jared Diamond again,
(24:36):
I know I keep sighting, but man, this guy's great ideas.
Is he live? 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 them. Okay,
attention Jared Diamond, please contact us for reasons we'll figure
out later. Yeah, stuff podcast at how stuff works. Put
(24:57):
in the subject line, I'm Jared Diamond, bigative. 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.
(25:20):
So basically we were good at it to start and
we did everything we could. Basically, almost all animals that
are going to be domesticated on Earth have been domestically.
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,
(25:44):
where it's like the animals are born in their genetically
more comfortable around humans are born that way. With it.
With a tamed animal, you're like inventing the wheel with
each individual organism with us. With a domesticated animal, you've
taken a wild PCs and you've selected it enough so
that when an animal is born, it's cool being around
(26:06):
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
(26:27):
with you, right, But think about getting close to a
wolf pup. It's gonna be problematic. M let's go try
right now. Do you ever see that movie Never Cry Wolf,
the Disney movie from like the mid eighties. It was
so good. It wasn't he was live action. No, it
was way before his time. No, no no, no, I totally
(26:48):
know what you mean. I can picture the guy in
my head. He like goes and lives with the wolf Man.
That's a good movie. Yeah, he was in I can't remember.
He's in another movie. So when when we did Domestic,
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
(27:11):
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 years. Um.
The only other animal in the wild that has floppy
(27:33):
years is the African elephant. Every other animal in the
wild has perky ears, 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. 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.
(27:56):
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
(28:18):
to let it 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 front 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
(28:42):
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. Yeah, well 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
(29:03):
about forty years UM by a Russian geneticist named Dmitri Balleyev.
And Balete 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
(29:24):
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,
(29:45):
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 little fox getting his belly rubbed, it looks
sort of like dogs, but they are DNA evidence. They
(30:05):
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 at
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? Pug from a
gray wolf or something like that. Have you seen that
(30:27):
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 bolting out. Anyway, he's trying to
like have sex with the c no know, 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
(30:49):
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.
(31:12):
Apparently with canine specifically, selective 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
(31:35):
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 and 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
(31:58):
of the more tame wolves rummage around our garbage and
for food, and so if you were a more tamele,
if you're more likely to survive, 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
(32:21):
almost um. But either way, they think that dogs descended
from wolves or diverged 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.
(32:43):
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 quarry, 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,
(33:04):
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
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
(33:26):
of the dog is they in ancient Rome, apparently women
is 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 growed 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,
(33:49):
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.
(34:10):
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. Okay, so cats don't follow
in alpha male, which leads to a puzzle of how
(34:31):
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
(34:51):
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 line in about the 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,
(35:11):
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 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 um domesticated, but there's
(35:32):
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. They love cats
and dogs, right, and I think cats were even had
(35:53):
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 I knew us was the dog.
So um again, cats probably are not technically domesticated, but
(36:22):
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
(36:45):
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. 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
(37:08):
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,
a little, 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
(37:33):
on that thing and pull it over here, and then
eventually plows and the force wheel wagons. And some say
that we wouldn't have even gotten to where we were
with the 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 breed them for their wool, although apparently there
(37:54):
was a five thousand year differential between the time we
domesticated cheap and the time we started um using wool.
Oh yeah, yeah, before the loom, before they started weaving
by hand. Goats. Goats were great because they'll eat anything. Um,
so they're super useful. Um. You can be on infertile
(38:17):
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, yeah, I did
not know that. Um. I think they're just good for
looking at and thinking they're cute. That's one thing. H Pigs,
(38:37):
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.
You know. It's interesting. North America has a pretty fascinating
history as far as domesticated animals go. We pigs, in particular,
(39:02):
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
(39:23):
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
(39:47):
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 train.
(40:12):
D 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 following
the invented the steam engine, and the horses were like,
all right, fine, we'll go over here. But then apparently
(40:33):
at first they were used for their meat and their milk, yeah,
horse milk again. And then they were used as a
mode of transportation. UM. Donkeys also good for transporting in Egypt.
They came out of Egypt. Camels good for transport, And
you've got a couple of different kinds, the Bactrian and
the Arabian camels. UM, and the just using animals for
(40:57):
transport and for work kind 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 you can ruin everything. Yeah,
(41:20):
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 uh. Turkeys. I didn't know this. They
were the um one of the few indigenous North American
(41:43):
domesticated animals. Yeah, Mesoamericans domesticated them. Who knew? I didn't
know that either. Although if that Fletcher boat you should
read four 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.
(42:04):
This is discussing 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
(42:24):
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 on the other biscuit. Uh,
did you make the biscuit yourself? You we did nice
from scratch from the can. Yeah, okay, those are good though.
(42:46):
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,
(43:06):
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
apparently bees will have a tendency to uh tie their
honeycombs into the wall of the box, let's say, and um,
(43:30):
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 can see saying bees
(43:52):
are domesticated. They don't sting you, they're used to being
around people. Yeah. Um, silkworms yeah 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
(44:16):
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 as tamed but not domesticated. Yes,
like the elephant, just because Hannibal rides an elephant doesn't
(44:39):
mean it's domesticated. It meant he had a tamed elephant
to ride and chuck. Just before we wrap up, 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 increas east because we don't
(45:02):
have to carry a kid like ten kilometers every day
because we're not hunter gatherers, so we can have more
kids on the horse and 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,
(45:25):
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
(45:48):
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
(46:11):
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,
(46:34):
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. So that's that you
got anything else. I've got nothing else, man, you need
to read that tonight. Okay, if you want to know
(46:59):
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 sinsistant 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
(47:19):
of their little like two and three dollar packets, which
is 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. Alright, 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
(47:41):
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
(48:03):
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. You know,
every time we turned on our two they would have
loved me because I would just be drunk on table
wine the whole time. Every time we turned on the
TV or opened up our laptop, we had to press
a button about who was watching. Uh. And using the
(48:24):
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. Uh,
and we owned a Mac. So that's a grand Slam apparently.
(48:49):
Uh it seems yeah, I guess. So it seems like
we're 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
(49:10):
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. You can join us on
(49:33):
Facebook dot com slash stuff you Should Know. You can
send us an email to Stuff Podcast at how stuff
Works dot com and check out our home on the web,
Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works
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