Stuff You Should Know - How Animal Domestication Works

Episode Date: September 25, 2014

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic

podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all. And now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.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. And that's Stuff You Should Know. How's it going? Fine. What are you guys? It's just friendly. Icebreaker. Oh, I see. Yeah. As if we didn't just record

another track. We did. It was on Police Interrogate. That's right. So, Chuck. Yes. You've heard of Jared Diamond before, right? No. It ranked familiar. He wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel. Oh, okay. Yeah. He wrote Collapse. He's known for those two books. I don't think I know that one. I think it came after Guns, Germs, and Steel. But he wrote one of my favorite journal articles of all time. It's called The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race about agriculture, about transitioning to agriculture. I was going to guess on what that might be. Oh, sorry. That's right. What do you guess that it's about? I don't know. Agriculture. Well, the thing is, it may be the worst mistake in the history of the human race.

I've talked about it a million times. Yeah. The article that is. But he also wrote this really interesting article called Evolution, Consequences, and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication, which sounds extremely boring. Yeah. And it's in nature, the journal nature. I bet it's not boring, though. It isn't boring. Yeah. It's really, really interesting because in it, he talks about animal domestication. And he says that it came about as a result of typically and about the same time as agriculture, the Neolithic Revolution, where we went from hunter gathers to agriculturists, right, to farmers. And everything changed, like we grew shorter in stature, our brains grew smaller, our jaws grew shorter. We got just weird in a bunch of different

ways, right? 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, yeah, the same thing happens. Yeah. So his point is what he's arguing is that not only did humans domesticate animals, humans in turn have become domesticated themselves through agriculture. Yeah. There's probably nothing that's had a greater impact. No single transition or change or concept that's had a greater impact on Homo sapiens than the Neolithic Revolution or the transition to agriculture. Boom. And a big part of that was the domestication of animals. Yeah, they kind of went hand in hand. In a hoof in hand, which to me is hilarious because consider this, I think this is the

funniest thing I've ever thought of in my life. Wow. Imagine being an alien, come down to earth. All right. And 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. Yeah. It makes no sense. But if you're an alien, you see an animal riding another animal. Yeah. And that would have to be the funniest thing you've ever seen, ever. If you're a Martian. Yeah. An animal riding another animal. Yeah. You know, like those little cowboy monkeys that ride dogs and stuff like that. It's hilarious and that same thing. It's the exact same thing. Or when you watch Planet of the Apes and the an ape riding a horse. That's not funny. That's unsettling. That's terrifying.

Yeah. That is the funniest thing you've ever said. Yes. Yes it is. So man, that was a good setup. Thanks man. It's been a while since we've gotten an old Josh story. I get really excited about anthropology. Well, we are covering domestication and I guess we should say off the bat that not everyone is on board. PETA 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. Officially, they are against pet keeping. Sure. But they know it's too late. They hate pets. But they know it's too late. They're like, we know what they are not for is for setting these animals free. Here's why. The original co-founder I think is Ingrid Newkirk

is an animal abolitionist. But PETA is like it's way too far gone. We don't want you to set these animals free. So we're going to fight our fight on spaying and neutering and reducing that population as much as possible. Right. But they are still officially against pets. Right. But their position actually does make sense as extremely realistic because there is a strict definition of a domesticated animal. Yeah. And a domesticated animal is a species that was formerly wild that has been taken in by humans and whose characteristics have been so radically altered by humans that they can no longer feed themselves typically. Yeah. It's when we actually change their genetic makeup. Yes. And part of that change, part of the characteristic change,

is that the food supply is controlled by humans. So if you put, say, an average dog out. My dog luckily would be dead inside three days. Yeah. And somebody would say, well, they would forage through garbage. Humanity, if you took a dog out of any kind of human area and put it in the area, it may return to a primal state in which case that dog is reverted to a feral state. Now a feral animal is one that was formerly domesticated and then went back to the wild. Yeah. If you take a single wolf and you teach it to jump up and grab beef jerky out of your hands. Yeah. What you have there. Good wolfie. That's a tame wolf. Yeah. Now a tame wolf could still go fend for itself. It's a tame individual. A domesticated animal is one that's born

comfortable associating with humans. Yeah. And there's exceptions, of course. Cats, the domestic house cat being one, you could drop a cat out in the middle of the woods. Yeah. And they would survive. They would hunt mice and eat mice or whatever, squirrels. So the domestic cat is its own species. Yeah. But that raises some questions under Jared Diamond's definition, the stricter definition of a domestic animal. If a cat can just go, like, take care of itself, is it technically feral or is it ever really domesticated? Yeah. Or is it just an agreement? Hey, I'll catch the mice in your house. And I like that wet food every day at 5 p.m. So I'll just hang out here. Exactly. And I like to sleep under your chin.

Like the cat. The cat has found an agreeable arrangement that it could take or leave at any time. Yeah. Mutually beneficial. And as we'll see, that's a consistent thing in the domestication of animals is that some people believe that it's good for the animal. It's good for the human. Yeah. And we have learned to scratch each other's backs in many different ways. Literally even in some cases. So a little bit of a good background for this one might be to listen to our show on natural selection. Yes. Because, well, it covers natural selection. But there's another kind of selection called artificial selection when it comes to domesticating animals. And that is not the same thing. That is when humans are choosing these desirable traits

and making it so through breeding. Like the original horses, the first domesticated horses were They smoked cigars. They did. We broke them over that habit. No, they were small like ponies. There were little ones, a little wild horses in Mongolia. I think they call them the Zawalskis. They're not a family in Pittsburgh. No, it was a Russian army officer that they're named after. But when you start your name with three consonants, I never know which one is silent. Oh, okay. So how do you spell it? PRZ. Oh, I was not going to guess that spell. EW Alski. So I'm just going to say Zawalski's horse. But people were at one point were like, man, I'd love to ride that thing, but he's too small. So find the biggest one that's a male and

find the biggest one that's a female. Make them go have sex. And maybe they'll have a bigger one, bigger son, and then make that one mate with someone big. And eventually these things are going to be big enough to where we can ride them. And then by proxy, throw away the ones that don't fit the criteria that we want. Or use them for something else, like food. But that's what we did with dogs too. Like you got a bunch of different ones, right? Say big, small, soft, furry, fast, cuddly. And we said, well, we like this one for this. And we'd like that one for that. And so artificial selection was still going on. We were just spreading it out all over the place with like say a horse or something. We wanted bigger and stronger because we wanted to ride them.

And we also wanted to apparently drink their milk, which I did not know. But it makes sense that horses produce milk because they're 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 describe it. Did someone out there is drinking horse milk right now while they're listening to the show? One of our Mongolian listeners. Straight from the teat. I think they're like, they use the horse for all sorts of stuff, the Mongolians. They're also like excellent riders. Yeah. I think that Zawalski's horse is in Mongolia again after being nearly extinct. I might be wrong about that. So in addition to selecting the big

horse, we also did some cool stuff with sheep. We selected out there. They had longer coarser hair that we didn't want. That's the camp. We wanted the softer stuff that was inside, aka the wool. So we bred sheep that had more wool than camp until basically you can't find camp and sheep any longer. And they were one of the first domesticated animals, right, the sheep? Yep, they were. Chickens don't normally produce eggs as frequently as they do once they've been domesticated. Yeah. And like a Rhode Island Red will produce five to seven a week. That's a lot of eggs. Yeah, apparently the original chicken, too. I didn't look this up, but I remember a friend of mine that was a vegetarian. I've witnessed an argument between

a vegetarian and a meat eater, which is always fun because I don't get involved in that stuff. And I think one of them was like, well, look at the chickens. You know, what else are they going to do? You know, what are they good for? And he was like, dude, the original chicken wasn't anything like this chicken. Yeah. The original wild chicken was like taller and leaner and ran super fast and road runner. I guess. Yeah. I guess solve crimes 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 cock fighting. Yeah, for entertainment. Yeah. Crazy. We have a shameful, shameful history, don't we? As people human. Yeah. So Diamond, you would think if we can

domesticate animals, why don't we just domesticate them all and use them for purposes? And Diamond writes that only about 14 animal species out of 148 candidates have been domesticated. And that's because we can't domesticate every animal. There's certain things, certain criteria that even opens up the possibility. Yeah. There's like a six point checklist basically. And it's not progressive. If any one of these characteristics or traits isn't met, it pretty much just throws off the whole deal. So you got to have all six. All right. Those six are the first one is the right diet. If you're a picky animal, like what's the one that only eats bamboo? The bamboo toad. Those dumb koalas. Koalas. No, they eucalyptus. Yeah. Yeah. Man, I'm glad you remember that. Yeah. You're not going to

be able to domesticate a koala because what you want is something that you can feed in mass quantities on cheap, accessible food. Oh, well, actually bamboo would be the way to go. It's eucalyptus. Yeah. I don't know how eucalyptus goes. If they bamboo, they'd probably be domesticated in that. Well, no, by cheap, accessible food. I think they mean like millions of pounds of feed that you can put in a trough. Do bamboo is like one of the fastest growing plants on earth? No, I realize that. Are we still talking about eucalyptus? But it's eucalyptus. Yeah. Yeah. But this bamboo thing, have you heard about bamboo? You know, I have a company that grows it. Oh, Josh's bamboo floors. The number two thing is a fast growth rate. So I got to 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 gorillas only reproduce fairly infrequently. Okay. So we need something that can build a skyscraper fast. And that's why that didn't work when they tried it. Yeah. But that one gorilla wearing that hard hat got a lot of laughs. Friendly disposition. 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. Oh, wow. Yeah. Zebras very famously can't be domesticated. Yeah, because I imagine people would be like, man, I want to ride that thing. It's cool looking.

Yeah. And it'll bite you to death. Really? Yeah. Apparently in the Jared Diamond article, he says that zebras account for more injuries to zookeepers than any other animal at the zoo. Man. Yeah. That is one pissed off stripy horse. They're not horses at all, though, are they? They're related for sure. Well, yeah. So the zebras one and then koalas two apparently are like ferocious little animals. While they're trying to eat in bamboo. You glit this. Right. One, two, three, four. Easy breeding. Yeah. That's pretty obvious. You got to be able to pump out little baby puppies quickly. Yes. Because some 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 in captivity.

Yeah. Cheetahs too. Is that why it's always such a big deal when they're born? Yeah. At the zoo. Or when like twins are born at like at the Atlanta Zoo. Oh, yeah. Man, I don't know about zoos. Well, we did a podcast on that. I think that's the conclusion we came to, huh? I think that was the title of it. Man, I don't know about zoo. Yeah. What does it call our zoos good or bad for animals? Yeah. That was a good episode. Yeah. It's one of those long lost overlooked ones that are so good. That's polarizing too, man. I did some Facebook posting about killer whales in captivity and people really feel passionately about. Oh, like blackfish? About supporting SeaWorld or not supporting SeaWorld. And that blackfish is a bunch of bunk. And apparently blackfish was

highly manipulated. The documentary was. But at the end of all that, I was like, I don't care. I just don't think they should be kept in captivity. Yeah. This one particular thing. But that was just me. Respect of a social hierarchy. That's a big one. Big. Because if you don't, if you can't be the alpha dog and the leader of the pack, then you're going to have a very hard time domesticating that animal. Yeah. But with a cat being an exception. An animal that does follow a social hierarchy is basically prearranged to be domesticated. Yeah. Because you just take that alpha male and punch them in the face a couple of times in front of everybody, make them cry. And then now you're the alpha male and you say, start laying eggs and they listen to you.

And then they're domesticated, at least in that respect. After you punch the chicken. Yeah. But that's a big one is with that social hierarchy. It sets them up. They're predisposed to our method of domestication, which is listening to humans. And like sheep, it's mind blowing because sheep, they're a herd animal that follows an alpha leader, right? Yeah. And so we have gotten so, we're just show off. So 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 charge of the sheep as the alpha male of the sheep. Yeah. That's how sheep are herded. That's just showing off. The aliens. That's another good alien laugh. The double domestication thing. Yeah. The dog leading the sheep. Yeah.

And it's funny too, if you ever had a dog that say a herding has the herding instinct, when you see that play out in your own home. Yeah. We used to see it all the time with Lucy. She would totally hurt us. And when we let her out in the backyard, she would walk the perimeter of the fence, you know, instead of running through the middle of it. Yeah. Very interesting stuff. Yeah. You see that original, those original tendencies. And then the last one is they won't panic. If you have an animal that freaks out behind a fence. Like deer? Yeah. It's, you're going to have a real hard time there. But like we said, there are exceptions because wolves were fierce and cats don't follow a pack leader. And we're going to get the dogs and cats a little later.

But first, right after this break, we're going to talk a little bit about the history of domestication. Chuck, you know who makes a cool website? Yeah. You do. If you use Squarespace.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 drag and drop for Pete's sake. That's right. You're going to have a beautiful, clean design. Your website is going to look super great. Your content basically is going to become the focus of your website, which is what everyone wants. Yeah. And if you get jammed up, man, you just get in touch with Squarespace. They have 24 seven customer support through email and live chat. That's right. And

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So if you listen to our show on cave art, you know that and on Egyptology, you know the animals. What else? Momification? Yeah, probably so. You know, the animals have been tied to humans for a long time and revered by humans for a long time as evidenced by the fact that they buried them and they mummified them and they painted them on their walls, painted pictures of us riding them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They think that the first animal to be domesticated by far was the dog. Yeah. How awesome is that? Hunter gatherer society was and the dog were pals long before agriculture ever came along. But about the time of the agricultural revolution, which is and get this check this out. Yeah. 10,500 years BP to about 4500 years BP. Now what's BP before present?

Is that the new one? Yeah. That's like the scientific way of saying it. There's no like zero year or anything like that. It's just 10,500 years before present. Before present. Before present, not British. That was New Zealand. So basically, at some point, about 10,500 years ago, what they think happened is the earth's climate changed. Maybe we killed off enough of the megafauna through overhunting or through climate change. They just went extinct. And about that time, some plants came around that we noticed we really liked. And maybe accidentally, we started growing them. And then we figured out that we could just select these ones and yeah, 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. Yeah. I think we're the big first three and they still are the big three. Oh yeah. Like those are the money domesticated animals, you know? Well, yeah. And like you said, it's tied to human natural selection as well, because if you are the tribe that has figured out how to keep cattle, then you're going to do better than your neighboring tribe that hasn't yet. And so you are going to be more successful as a civilization. Yeah, you are. And you're going to conquer like we talked about. And I think the royalty one, we talked a lot about tribes conquering other tribes through agriculture, through exporting agriculture. And as a result, Jared Diamond points out, 88% of humans alive

today speak one of seven language families. And they come from two places in Eurasia, which were the first places for agriculture to take root. So basically, those tribes were so effective because of agriculture. Today, we still basically, the vast majority of speak one of seven language groups. Wow. That's crazy. Years, all these thousands of years later, that's how effective agriculture was it, asserting authority. 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. Here's a little breakdown of where some of your favorite animals came from. So in Southeast Asia is where you first got your goats, pigs, sheep, and dogs. Southwest Asia. Yeah, we went over to Central Asia.

That's like Mesopotamia. Okay. These were the birth of it all. Yes. Central Asia, you're going to get your chickens and your two humped Bactrian, is that what's pronounced? Yeah, it looks like it. Camel. Central Asia. Yeah, and those camels were actually well known for long hair, and they could survive in cold climates. Yes, they're not just desert dwellers, right? No. 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, cars are pretty cool too. Yeah, actually, it was much sooner than that. Arabia is where you have the Arabian camel with the single hump.

China, they domesticated pigs and the water buffalo and dogs. Move over to the Ukraine, and you've got the wild tarpon horses. Yeah. And so what most folks think are the original, the original, the OG, the original horse. Right. Even though I read about the small ones in Mongolia. Yeah. The Kowalski. Yeah, the Kowalski family. Yeah, I'm gonna have to look that up. And then Egypt, you've got your donkeys. And then South America, you've got your llama and your alpaca. Llama is a beast of burden in the alpaca for their soft wool. And the guinea pig for their meat. Oh, really? Yeah. In South America? Yeah. The Andes. I don't want to eat a guinea pig. That's what they were bred for originally. Really? Yeah. Wow. And those were some of the earliest

ones. And Jared Diamond, again, I know I keep citing him, but man, this guy's great ideas. Is he live? Yeah. Okay. So he's a modern man. Yeah. He's got a little beatnik pointy beard and everything. Really? Yeah. He's a good guy. Let's get in touch with him. Okay. Attention, Jared Diamond, please contact us for reasons we'll figure out later. Yeah. Stuff podcast at HowStuffWorks put in the subject line. I'm Jared Diamond. There you go. And now we're gonna get 500 crackpots. It'll be Lou Bega posing as Jared Diamond. Nice one. So Diamond pointed out that over the last thousand years, only one substantial animal has been added to the list of domesticated animals. So basically, we were good at it to start,

and we did everything we could. Basically, almost all animals that are going to be domesticated on earth have been domesticated. Was it the hamster? It was the reindeer. Oh, the hamster went until 1930, though. Yes, I know. And if you read that, that's technically a tamed animal. Oh, it's not domesticated. Not under the strictest definition where it's like the animals are born in their genetically modified. They're comfortable around humans. They're born that way. With it, with a tamed animal, you're like inventing the wheel with each individual organism. Gotcha. With a domesticated animal, you've taken a wild species, and you've selected it enough so that when an animal is born, it's cool being around a human. Whereas if you're around like a gerbil or a hamster

baby, it's not going to be cool around you. It doesn't have thousands of years of genetic information telling it that from birth, it can be comfortable with you because you're going to give it some pellets to eat. Okay. Whereas a dog, a puppy, will just automatically snuggle up with you. Right. But think about getting close to a wolf pup. It's going to be problematic. Let's go try it right now. Do you ever see that movie, Never Cry Wolf? The Disney movie from like the mid-80s? That was so good. Uh-oh. Oh, wait. There's live action. Eat and talk? No, it was way before his time. No, no, no. I totally know what you mean. I can picture the guy in my head. He like goes and lives with the wolf by himself. Yeah, I saw it. Man, that's a good movie.

Yeah. He was in, I can't remember. He was in another movie. So when we did domesticate it, like I said, we took a wild animal, underwent a process through artificial selection to where it just became something different. Yeah. And there's certain traits that they're not quite sure how they happen, but they're clearly linked to the genes that lead to domestication, that take an animal and turn it from wild to tame to domesticated that have outward signals and signs like floppy ears. Yeah. The only other animal in the wild that has floppy ears is the African elephant. Yeah. Every other animal in the wild has perky ears. Yeah. But it's almost like it's a signal like, okay, we're tame now. Our ears don't need to perk up. It totally is. Smaller

brain size. Yep. They don't need to be as smart 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And then I realized it was Carter and 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 and let him out and forgot to let it back in. Yeah. And little Carter just slept on the front porch. Oh, it's like the sweetest thing ever. But Carter survived is my point.

But sleeping on the front porch and being like scratching on it like, please let me in. Yeah. So yeah, smaller brains, curly hair, sharp sense of sight and hearing. Well, it's lessened. Yeah, it's lessened because they don't need that stuff either. Right. Because they're being cared for by humans. The humans are saying, you just get dumb. We're in charge now. Yeah. We'll teach everything you need to know. We got a lot of this data, this information from a... Jared Diamond? Very no, not even a very famous study that went on for about 40 years by a Russian geneticist named Dmitry Belayev. And Belayev said, hey, I'm going to figure out how domestication actually

works and I'm going to take silver foxes and I'm going to compress the domestication process. And basically over the course of like 30 or 40 years, even after he died, his colleagues and interns and assistants carried on this experiment. So it's been going on for maybe 50 years. Oh, well. And they found that you can get predictable results from domesticating animals and they've domesticated some silver foxes. Their ears started getting floppy, their skulls started to get smaller, they started to get curly hair, some of them started to bark, and they were born comfortable around humans. Yeah. And here's the thing. If you've seen, there's a really cute video on the internet about a little fox getting his belly rubbed.

It looks sort of like dogs, but they are DNA evidence, they have pretty much proven that dogs are descended from the Asian gray wolf and have nothing to do with foxes. But that's just proof through this experiment that taming and domesticating this animal can lead to these traits. Yeah, because a lot of people are like, how do you get a pomeranian from a gray wolf or a pug from a gray wolf or something like that? Have you seen that picture or that pug who's clearly messing around with a crawfish and gets his tongue bit and it's like in midair and you know, they have huge eyes that are bulging out anyway. He's trying to like have sex with a crawfish? No, no, like he was sniffing it and it's the crawfish like grabbed onto his tongue.

And now the crawfish is hanging onto his tongue in the midair as the pug's like squealing or whatever, it's hilarious. Anyway, 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. Apparently, with canine specifically, selective breeding can affect the species really rapidly. And there's been evidence of pecanese dogs as far back as first century AD China. So they weren't wolves for long once we decided. And you know, there's different theories on how that very first happened. One of them, which I like, is that

people found abandoned pups. And it's just a natural human instinct to see a little puppy and care for it. So they said, well, let me take this little wolf puppy, because it needs a home. We should talk about the science of cute sometime. It's really interesting. Like, why would you find things cute and emailed the other day? We'll have to do that one. So yeah, that's one of the theories. The other one is that maybe some of the more tame wolves would rummage around our garbage and for food. And so if you were a more tame wolf, you're more likely to survive, eventually that would evolve into a more doglike species. Yeah, because you're the human garbage pile was much more reliable source of food than say like whatever was growing in the

wild. So exactly, they would be that's natural selection basically through artificial means almost. Yeah. But either way, they think that dogs descended from wolves or diverged from wolves as long as 100,000 years ago, but they didn't really start to undergo the drastic morphological changes until maybe 15,000 years ago. Yeah. And again, all of this predates the advent of agriculture. So that means that hunter-gatherers and dogs were friends for a while. And they think the reason that happened was because they figured out that a dog could go flush out some quarry. Yeah. A hunter-gatherer could spear it and then tear off a piece and give the dog some and eat some himself. And they had a symbiotic hunting relationship that was aces. Yeah, like we said earlier,

mutually beneficial. It was great for the dog. They were fast and fierce and we were smart. And because we already mentioned, dogs are innately want to follow a lead dog, an alpha dog. Yeah. It just, it was kind of like the perfect relationship. And it has been ever since. Yeah. And one of the other cool things about the domestication of the dog is they, in ancient Rome, apparently women, 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 curled up on their lap. So how's your tummy feel now? So we selected them for that. So we selected them for that. We selected, oh, I don't know,

sheepdogs to herd and terriers to catch rats. And you know, that explains all this variation in dog breeds. Yeah. I saw a cool special on it the other day. It was on, I think it was on Animal Planet, but it wasn't one of those just like, look how cute everything is. It was kind of like the science behind the history of these animals. It was really cool. Gotcha. So let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about cats and other stuff too. Right after this. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody hear for me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're gonna want to

find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this. And I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Hey, I'm Lance Bass host of the new I heart podcast frosted tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this. I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to frosted tips with Lance Bass on the I heart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so cats don't follow an alpha male, which leads to a puzzle of how they could possibly have been domesticated. And if you talk to certain people, they may not have ever really been domesticated. Yeah. Cats don't look different

than their, their ancestors. Right. Which means that it makes it tough to go back and compare modern cats to the cats and the fossil record and say, Oh, they diverged X number of years ago or whatever. Yeah. That's one of my favorite things about cats is when you look at a cat in the backyard, you know, crouched down to leap on the bird. It looks just like a big lion. Right. 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, they came instead from a couple of different wildcats, a European wildcat and an African wildcat. And both of those are still around today. And they think that that's what the cats last common ancestors were. Or if you look at it,

it looks like it. Yeah. Like if you look at the African wildcat, it looks like just a bigger version of a tabby. Yes. And they, they don't know exactly when they were domesticated, but there's evidence that as far back as 9,500 years ago, there's at least one grave site where a cat was clearly buried with a human, which indicates some sort of important and familialness with a cat. Yeah. They love cats and dogs. Right. And I think cats were even had like religious significance, but, or maybe both of them did. But because Anubis, that was the dog, right? I don't remember. I just remember Horus was the hawk. Right. Right. But ancient Egyptians love their dogs and cats. It was Horus the dog. I think Anubis was the dog.

So again, cats probably are not technically domesticated. But well, the reason why we took them in though is the same reason that some people still take them in now is because they're good mousers. Right. And that's pretty much the explanation for domestication in a lot of ways. Like they, the animals were useful for work. That's right. So some of the other animals, very ancient domesticated animals that we domesticated for work. And I guess I should say it wasn't just for work. Probably initially we domesticated animals for a food supply, like their milk. Yeah. Things like cattle, cows, we domesticated them for milk, of course. Yeah. Their ancient ancestor, it's now extinct called the Auroch. And yeah,

that's what led to modern tame cattle, apparently. Right. Oxen, we domesticated them for work, although there's milk from them. You can pretty much drink milk from anything. Yeah. An ox, I think was, you can milk anything. Just a little milking. The ox, I think was even stronger than the cow and they would pull initially sledges, like put a bunch of junk on that thing and pull it over here and then eventually plows and of course, wheel wagons. And some say that we wouldn't have even gotten to where we were with the wheel if it hadn't been for things like ox. Yeah. Because we would have had to pull it. Yeah. That's no good. No. Sheep, we eventually figured out that we could breed them for their wool,

although apparently there was a 5,000 year differential between the time we domesticated sheep and the time we started using wool. Oh yeah. Yeah. Before the loom or before they started weaving by hand. Yeah. Goats, goats are great because they'll eat anything. So they're super useful. You can be on infertile rocky land and a goat is pretty happy. They're great climbers. Yeah. They eat them. Yeah. Got meat, unfortunately. You can make cheese out of their milk. Yeah. Did you know that cashmere comes from goats? Yeah. I did not know that. Did not know that. I think they're just good for looking at and thinking they're cute. Sure. That's one thing. Pigs, of course, are descended domesticated from the wild boar and pigs were

domesticated mainly because they would eat waste and trash and so they were handy to have around because they would eat our trash and then we would eat them. Right. You know, it's interesting. North America has a pretty fascinating history as far as domesticated animals go. With pigs in particular, the wild hogs in North America were not around. There are a couple of pig-like animals, but there's no true wild pigs in North America or there weren't until the 16th century when DeSoto brought a bunch of domesticated pigs who wandered off, some of which wandered off, and became the wild hogs of the Americas. Well, that's the same thing happened to the horse. Exactly. They originally came over on the Bering Land Bridge and then went extinct and then the

Spanish brought them over and they said, hey, I don't know why there aren't horses here already because this is pretty great. Yeah. 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. Unless they're faking it. No. Cumberland Island is here in Georgia. For those of you that don't know, we're not talking about some like South American country. No, Cumberland Island. Yeah, right here in the South. And you know what's cool is, and for me, this is the fact of the podcast. After the horse, the next step forward in speed transportation was 5,000 years later with the steam train. Yeah. That's why we still see the horse. Like for 5,000 years,

horses were as fast as we could go and tie up 12 of them to that stage coach and we'll be 12 horses strong. Yeah. But yeah, for 5,000 years, it's just amazing. Yeah. And then finally, they invented the steam engine and horses were like, all right. Fine, we'll go over here. But apparently at first, they were used for their meat and their milk. Yeah, horse milk, again. Again. And then they were used as a mode of transportation. Donkeys, also good for transporting. Like we said, Egypt. Yeah, they came out of Egypt. Camels, good for transporting. You got a couple of different kinds, the Bactrian and the Arabian camels. And just using animals for transport and for work kind of allowed for not only the agricultural revolution to take hold,

but for it to spread as well through trade routes and stuff that allowed humans to just move longer distances faster. So that was another big way that domestication changed humanity. It helped us spread like a plague over the face of the earth. So we could ruin everything. Yeah. I guess we can talk about some other smaller livestock like chickens and roosters. Like you said earlier, this was, I think maybe the second fact of the show is possibly domesticated for entertainment as cockfighters. Yeah. Which is sad. Turkeys, I didn't know this. They were the one of the few indigenous North American domesticated animals. Yeah. Mesoamericans domesticated them. Who knew? I didn't know that either. Although if that floats your boat, you should read 1493

because stuff like that comes up a lot. I just need to read both those at some point. I can't believe you haven't. I know. Here's another one. Bees. We domesticated bees. I'm sure through a very long and painful process. This is discussed in 1493 as well. Yeah. 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 herding sheep. Oh yeah, yeah. But this is bees pollinating almonds. Yeah. Well, bees, we did a great episode on that. That's how we sweetened everything for many, many years and still do using honey. Yeah. But last night, it's still delicious. In a cocktail? No, on a biscuit. Oh, nice. A little honey on a biscuit. Did you make the

biscuit yourself? You did. Nice. From scratch? No. From the can. Yeah. Okay. Those are good, though. Oh yeah. You know, it's real good. I've noticed is the frozen ones in the bag instead of the can. They rise a lot more like a traditional southern biscuit to me. We wanted just like a nasty, buttery, like layer biscuit. The flaky layers? Yeah. Man, those are good. Yeah. And it's always fun to open the package, too. And it's delicious with honey. But thanks to a man named LL Langstrawth, he is the guy who really made beekeeping. There were a lot of people working with frames already, but he's the one, he's the first guy that made removable and movable frames. Yeah. Which apparently,

bees will have a tendency to tie their honeycombs into the wall of the box, let's say, and 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. Yeah. So thanks to him in 1852. Smart guy. We could domesticate those bees for their delicious honey. And so here's where it comes. It kind of falls apart for me. I could see saying bees are domesticated. Sure. They don't sting you. They're used to being around people. Yeah. Silkworms? Yeah. No. No. No. Rabbits? No. I would say that you can tame a rabbit, but for the most part, they're not domesticated. Okay. And then the same with hamsters, which I didn't realize that they were this recent.

Yeah. From 1930. And another fun fact is supposedly the entire population of domesticated, or I'm sorry, tamed hamsters, derives from that one hamster family. Yeah. Because they make so many little hamsters so quickly. Yeah. So you take issue with silkworms, rabbits, and hamsters. I do. As tamed, but not domesticated. Yes. Like the elephant. Just because Hannibal rides an elephant doesn't mean it's domesticated. It meant he had a tamed elephant to ride. And Chuck, just before we wrap up, I mentioned that humans in turn have been domesticated by agriculture. Yeah. And we have. Like we've undergone a lot of the same changes that domesticated animals undergo when we domesticate them. Like our reproductive period has increased.

Yeah. Because we don't have to carry a kid like 10 kilometers every day because we're not hunter gatherers, so we can have more kids. Yeah. Just go on the horse and ride all over town. Exactly. 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 ravaged by and also immune to a lot of diseases. Yeah. 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. Yeah. And then secondly, it also requires a lot of repeated close proximity to animals. And it turns out that all of our epidemic diseases

come from the agricultural revolution and are hanging out with livestock a lot. Yeah. Like, for example, influenza came from pigs and ducks. Yeah. Measles and tuberculosis came from cattle. Yeah. Possibly smallpox came from cattle, if not camels. Yeah. And then get this. The very fact that all of these, almost all of these worst epidemic diseases have their origins in Eurasia mean that that's because our domestication took place in Eurasia, which means that the people of Eurasia were able to develop resistance and immunity over the generations to these diseases. So they don't get these diseases as much? No. And when we came over, that's what wiped out the North American New World populations because they didn't have any resistance to these diseases.

So you can really make a case that agriculture changed everything more than anything else ever has. Wow. So that's that. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Man, you need to read 1491, 1493. I'll do that tonight. Okay. If you want to know more about animal domestication, you can type those two seemingly boring, but rather fascinating words into the search bar House of Works dot com. And that will bring up this article. And then since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this Nielsen family. We heard from quite a few, got quite a few people that showed pictures of their little like two and three dollar packets. Yeah. It's kind of neat. I don't think it's even $5 anymore. I think a couple of people just got

$2. Apparently they give you two to sweeten the pot. And then once you do it, you get more. That's what I think. 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. Apparently our address was picked at random by their computer program. And they sent out a representative with a gift set of ugly tumblers to convince us to participate. We agreed because they pay you about $200 every six months if you let them track your TV and computer usage. Rob, who was the representative, came by and installed the TV box and computer program. And we check in on us in person every six months and ask a set of questions about our life and purchasing habits. They always asked

about table wine, which I thought was interesting. Every time we turned on our, they would have loved me because I'd just be drunk on table wine the whole time. Every time we turn on the TV or open up our laptop, we had to press a button about who was watching and using the computer. It wasn't that hard, but it became annoying after a couple of years. So we were 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 30 with over the air TV, no cable like antenna. And we owned a Mac. So that's a grand slam, apparently. Yeah, I guess so. It seems like we were pretty rare find in the world,

in their world. So rare that when our two year participation ran out, it offered us a year long extension. We also got a bonus payment for being a minority household, which is hilarious because both of us are white as can be, but my husband is half Cuban. So that is from Laura and Chris right here in Atlanta. Nice. Laura and Chris Nielsen. Yeah, the Nielsen family. No cable under 30 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 syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.houseofworks.com and check out

our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit house stuffworks.com. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.