Docile and cute cats are the favorite of many people, and even many netizens have more than one or two. Speaking of cats, you may not think that in human history, cats were not raised as pets at the beginning, and their domestication is mainly considered to be related to agriculture, and humans should be mutually beneficial. Why do you say so, today I will take you to understand why the ancients domesticated cats and the development of agricultural civilization.
01, why are cats domesticated?
The reason why the ancients domesticated cats is currently mainly related to agriculture. The earliest traces of cat domestication were found in Cyprus, about 9500 years ago, when the owner of the tomb was buried with a cat, and there were some ornaments in the burial.
This is probably related to human agricultural civilization. Because the importance of the domestication of cats is to catch mice/birds, with the advent of agricultural civilization, humans began to grow crops, and the rat/bird flood can be said to be one of the important factors affecting agricultural yields.
Many people may not be familiar with the impact of rat infestation/bird harm, but if you know the process of eliminating the four pests at the time of the founding of the country, you know how much of an impact on crops it had in the first place.
Here is a quote from the "Occurrence Status and Prevention Strategies of Farmland Pest Rats" [1] to introduce the following rat infestation:
Farmland pest rats are harmful all year round, the harm to crops is extensive, farmland rice, cash crops and stored grain, greenhouse vegetables are the objects of their feeding hazards, and directly cause different degrees of yield loss and economic loss, among them, rice farmland due to hamster theft, the loss can reach 2~10 kg/667 m2, corn farmland loss of 2~5 kg/667 m2; The loss of stored grain is particularly serious by the damage of brown rats, with an average annual loss of nearly 20 kg per household, weighing more than 100 kg, and the loss of stored corn per household is about 10 kg per year; The average yield of vegetables is reduced by about 5%, and the yield of heavy people is reduced by more than 10%.
It can be seen that in modern agriculture, rat infestation still has an important impact. Push forward for thousands of years, without fertilizer and modern irrigation technology, seeds are not good, the yield is low, coupled with rat infestation and the like, then the loss is even greater. The same is true of birds, and scarecrows in the field are an important strategy for dealing with birds.
I often hear people in my hometown say that when flocks of birds come, the grain in a piece of land is often eaten almost as much as it gets.
02, the relationship between cats and humans in the beginning
Originally cats and humans were supposed to have a mutually beneficial relationship, with humans growing farmland with rats/birds and cats having food.
Then in the season when there are no crops to grow, then humans can provide certain food to the cats, and finally slowly some cats are domesticated. (In fact, the process of dog domestication is also like this, mutual benefit, and finally domesticated)
However, it is interesting that in fact, during the domestication of cats, there has always been genetic communication with wild cats. In domestic cats, some genes are positively selected, such as genes such as olfactory receptors (Or). Other genes related to stimulation-reward have also changed, and there are also mutations in genes related to lipid metabolism in domestic cats.
03,Shinsenjogi Incident
About 10,000 years ago, there was a sudden temperature change on the earth, and I believe many people know it, called the New Fairy Wood Event.
Called the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, it is named after an herb called fairywood, which was found in European deposits. In other words, at that time, the layout of this plant changed a lot.
The event was characterized by climate change on a global scale, before which the Earth was warm and pleasant, and even the North and South Poles had melted a considerable area, but in just a few decades, the Earth's temperature had cooled rapidly by seven or eight degrees, and this freezing lasted for nearly 1,000 years.
And the result of this rapid change is that the ancient humans who had previously eaten hot pot and sang songs and hunted everywhere suddenly faced the risk of famine. The poor changed, so they began to look for content that could provide a more stable source of income, and the domestication of agriculture appeared.
In West Asia, presumably in today's Turkish location, the natives began to domesticate wheat, while in East Asia, roughly in the lower reaches of today's Yangtze River, China began to domesticate rice.
04, the development of agricultural civilization
The biggest contribution of the series of events triggered by the new fairy incident was to lead to the arrival of agriculture, the agricultural era, people no longer migrated on a large scale, began to live and reproduce in a fixed place, and finally in this place there appeared villages, towns, and all kinds of more frequent commerce, and the end result was: civilization.
Yes, when it comes to civilization, no matter how you brag, it will not exceed 10,000 years, the Paleolithic Age 10,000 years ago, spanning up to 3 million years, it can be said that from the earliest human out of Africa (that wave of people including Neanderthals, Chinese Pekingese, etc. belong to this wave), Homo sapiens, although very good, but also do not see how superior they were in the Paleolithic Age (compared to that).
However, when faced with an absolute crisis, the superiority of Homo sapiens began to show, and they domesticated agriculture in a short period of time, and the result of agriculture was that human beings began to live in large-scale settlements and began to give birth to settlements, rather than the past life of water and grass.
With agriculture, human beings began to better exert corresponding efforts for the construction of their own settlements, and the emergence of agriculture further put forward higher requirements for social cooperation, gave birth to more social forms, and finally appeared civilization.
The content we see today, the writings, the laws, the governments, the calendars, are all products of the age of civilization, which in the Paleolithic age did not exist.
Therefore, without this event, perhaps the emergence of civilization would be far away.
The sudden outbreak of the new fairy wood incident, placed in the long river of human history, is only a very short moment, but this sudden event has triggered the emergence of human civilization, which can be called the butterfly effect.
By the way, the New Fairywood incident also has another name called the Clovis Comet Incident, and the impact of Clovis' Comet is one of the important speculations that triggered the accident.
With the advent of agricultural civilization, a large number of domesticated animals began to be domesticated, and you can trace it back to the process of human domestication of them. For example, dogs, hunting janitors, eating human scraps, and even dogs eating human feces.
Xu Qingyun. Occurrence status and control strategies of rats in farmland[J].Northern Rice,2007(03):125-127.