Ed Yong writes about the great confusion over how rabbits became domesticated. Apparently, there have been a few science-y urban myths floating around about this for some time (not that I had heard of them before.) But I also learnt some things about how rabbits have been used:
Archaeological evidence tells us that people in Spain and France were
eating rabbits as early as the Epipaleolithic period, between 20,000 and
10,500 years ago. During the Middle Ages, they became a high-status
food and people started carrying them across Europe. But it’s hard to
pinpoint exactly when this happened because of, as Irving-Pease and
Larson note, “the intrusion of rabbits into archaeological
stratigraphies.” Translation: It’s hard to know if a rabbit bone came
from an ancient rabbit, or a recent one that went digging...
....Rabbits are among the most
recently tamed animals, and yet neither history nor archaeology nor
genetics can accurately pinpoint when they were domesticated. “There is
solid genetic evidence that domestic rabbits are closely related to wild
rabbits from France, from which they were mostly derived,” says Miguel Carneiro from CIBIO, who recently did his own genetic study of rabbits. “But the timing, initial motivation, and the underlying process remain poorly understood.”
Larson thinks that’s because people tend to wrongly picture
domestication as a singular event. “Everything’s the same, and
everything’s the same, and something changes like a bolt from the blue,
and now everything’s different,” says Larson. “A lot of our narrative
structures hinge on that. But if you’re looking for a moment of
domestication, you’ll never find it. It’ll recede from your fingertips.”
Domestication
is a continuum, not a moment. Humans hunted rabbits, tens of thousands
of years ago. They transported the wild animals around the
Mediterranean. The Romans kept them as livestock in structures called
leporaria. Medieval Britons kept them in “pillow mounds”—raised lumps of
soil that acted as earthen hutches. Later, they used actual hutches.
Eventually, we bred them as pets. None of these activities represents
the moment when rabbits hopped over the domestication threshold. But
collectively, they show how wild bunnies turned into tame ones.
Yong says domestication of animals is hardly ever deliberate, anyway:
The problem is that there’s no solid evidence that humans domesticated anything deliberately (with the possible exception of tame foxes
that were bred for scientific purposes). There’s no unequivocal case
where humans grabbed a wild animal with the express intent of
domesticating it. Instead, for example, it’s likely that scavenging
wolves were attracted to human hunts or refuse piles, eventually
developing a more tolerant attitude that led to their transformation
into dogs. Similarly, mice were attracted to our grain stores, and cats
were attracted to the mice. “There is no why to domestication,” says
Larson. “That implies a directedness that appears not to exist.”
I wonder, however, if Yong is overlooking the matter of Jack Black, rat catcher to the Queen, who is credited with taming wild rats into pet fancy rats. Maybe Yong doesn't consider that pet rats are truly domesticated, but there is perhaps a debate to be had about that. From a book "Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World":
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