Hi, I’m the History Guy. I have a degree in history and I love history,
and if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
The establishment of sea trade routes was one of the most important events in human history.
While humans have been using seaworthy vessels to populate Oceania as early as fifty thousand
years ago, it wasn't really until about the fifth century BC that sea trade routes between
civilizations started to occur. Those early sea trade routes established connections between
cultures, they moved goods enormous distances, and they laid the foundation for an economic
activity that is still vitally important today, when 90% of the world's trade goods are moved
by the International shipping industry. And while many technologies had to be developed
to develop human sea trade, one innovation that came millennia earlier was surprisingly key. That
innovation had already played a central role in one of the most important developments in
human cultural history, and it still plays a central role in the high-tech world of social
media. I'm talking of course of one of the most important events ever to occur in human history,
the domestication of felis silvestris catus, otherwise known…as the house cat.
While our understanding of the prehistory of humanity is constantly evolving, homo sapiens,
or anatomically modern humans, were thought to have arisen in Africa between two and three
hundred thousand years ago. But for the vast majority of that time, somewhere around 95% of
the time that humans have spent on earth, humans were exclusively hunter-gatherers,
nomads with no set home. It was during that period that humans began a process that would
be critical to the development of the human race, we started to domesticate animals. While
the origin of domesticated dogs is a matter of some dispute, most scientists agree that
they were the first animals domesticated, possibly as far back as 40,000 years ago,
from a species of wolf that is now extinct. Wolves were almost certainly domesticated for the purpose
of hunting, in fact one theory suggests that wolves and humans domesticated each other,
and that human hunting techniques seemed to change with the domestication of dogs.
It was a symbiotic relationship that would allow both species to prosper.
But then, around 12,000 years ago, the most profound change in the history of human culture
started to occur, the Neolithic Revolution. After hundreds of thousands of years of wandering the
earth as hunters and gatherers in a period of just a few thousand years, vast swaths of the
world's human population gave up their nomadic lifestyle, and started living in settlements.
There are numerous theories about what drove the sudden and dramatic change, many dealing with
climate changes that occured as glaciers receded at the end of the last great Ice Age. This is a
period when more animal species were domesticated, including sheep and goats, and later pigs, horses
and donkeys, cattle, chickens and camels. But most importantly this period included the domestication
of crops, the selective breeding of cereal grasses to make them more amenable to agriculture. It was
this change, that while decreasing the variety of food sources, allowed people to achieve food
surpluses, requiring the storage of excess food, and that is where felis silvestris catus comes in.
As people started to store grain, that grain attracted vermin, notably rats and mice. Rats
and mice can be devastating to food stocks. A 1995 study of markets in Pakistan found that
just 40 rats can consume 185 kilograms of rice in a year, and typically spoil, or contaminate,
three times as much as they eat. And in the presence of food they can be incredibly prolific.
Just one pair of rats can produce as many as 10,000 offspring in a single year. Even today,
mice and rats eat and spoil enough rice in Asia, to feed an estimated 200 million people; and mice
and rats are notorious for spreading disease. And of course, cats excel at hunting mice and rats,
and one type of cat in particular was especially suited to domestication, the Near Eastern Wildcat,
also known as the African Wildcat. The species is native to North and East Africa, the Near
East and the Arabian Peninsula. Genetic research suggests the species arose somewhere between 70,
to a hundred thousand years ago. And while there are many wild cat species,
this species was unique, something in their genetic variants, some innate curiosity
made them more willing to approach humans who encouraged them as a means of controlling vermin.
This wasn't a fluke, researchers at Oxford University have found five different matriarchal
lineages from which all modern domestic cats belong. That indicates that cats of this species
were recruited across a wide area over time. The species was predilected towards its job.
While the original domestication were thought to have occured in Egypt, new evidence suggests it
occurred even earlier in Mesopotamia. But, once domesticated, they were popular. Cats seemed to
follow tribes as they migrated across the ancient world. In general, throughout Africa, Asia and
Europe, wherever humans settled down during the Neolithic Revolution, they brought cats with
them. Cats were in essence, a key technology in the most important event ever, in human culture.
It is hard to overstate what this means. The Neolithic Revolution first allowed
people to settle, this eventually resulted in greater population density which then gave
rise to political structures, and eventually civilizations. And thus, in some sense you
can say that cats were responsible for the rise of human civilization. They were so revered in Egypt,
for example, that it was illegal to export them. At least as early as the 5th century BC,
the penalty for killing a cat in Egypt was death. Cats likewise played a major
role in the mythology of many cultures, they are part of the literary tradition in India,
where the story of Puss in Boots is actually derived from an Indian folk tale from the 5th
century BC. In Persian legend, a magician created cats for the hero Rostam, weaving them from smoke,
flame, and two of the brightest stars in the sky. A beckoning cat is good luck in Japan, associated
with the God of Mercy, and an ancient Chinese myth says that cats were sent down by the gods,
to oversee the running of creation, but were too fond of sleeping to do a good job of it.
But the utility of cats had still not reached its zenith. Having played a critical role in
the rise of human civilizations, they would play another critical role in connecting
those civilizations together. By studying ancient cat DNA, researchers have been able to
determine that cat populations have a second great expansion starting around the fifth century BC,
when cats of Egyptian lineage were found to spread very quickly throughout Eurasia,
and Africa. The implication is simple, as soon as civilization started trading with
each other by sea, those sailors started carrying cats with them.
The reason for the ship's cat is very similar to the reason that they were domesticated
in the first place, pest control. Rats and mice can cause significant damage,
eating and contaminating the ship's stores needed to feed the sailors on long voyages,
damaging cargo and even destroying critical parts of the ship. Gnawing ropes, sails,
and even wood, quite the issue, on a wooden ship. Rats and mice can even damage wiring
on modern ships. Among the famous seafarers who apparently carried rats were the Vikings,
where a cat of Egyptian lineage was found in a Viking burial site in northern Germany. The
far-ranging Vikings, whose own mythology includes cats, may then have brought them to England,
Scotland, and Western Europe. In fact, cats were so integrated with world trade that the
etymology of the word cat is unknown. Unable to be determined because it has been shared
so widely among the diverging cultures, making the word a classic example of a wander word.
Having provided their essential service to facilitate yet another evolution in human culture,
ships cats remain a tradition to this day, and some have become quite famous. Blacky,
for example, the ship's cat aboard HMS Prince of Wales, garnered international attention when she
singled out Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the state visit in 1941. Blacky was renamed
Churchill, and later survived the sinking of the Prince of Wales. Or Chibley, the ship's cat on the
training barque Picton Castle, who circumnavigated the globe five times before retiring to land in
Nova Scotia in 2010. Or the sad tale of Mrs. Chippy, a companion to Henry McNish, the ship's
carpenter, on Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated 1914 Arctic expedition. When Shackleton's ship,
the Endurance, was crushed by ice, Shackleton ordered the cat to be killed as he did not think
it would survive an ice crossing. The decision was part of what contributed to McNish's brief
rebellion against Shackleton. Despite the bad blood, McNish was instrumental in the
successful voyage in open boats to find rescue. McNish's grave in New Zealand is adorned with a
statue of his beloved Mrs. Chippy. And maybe the most distinguished of the ships cats was Simon,
the ship's cats of the frigate HMS Amethyst, who not only single-handedly eliminated a below
deck rat infestation, but who survived grievous injury from Chinese shell fire
during the Yangtze Incident in 1949. Action for which he was awarded the Dickin Medal,
commonly called the Victoria Cross for Animals, and was promoted to the rank of Able Sea Cat.
Despite their centuries long tradition of keeping ships cats, the Royal Navy banned cats and other
pets in 1975. And yet ships cats are still very popular on private and commercial vessels today.
In 2017, for example, the USA Today ran a story about the adoption of a kitten named Lilu as the
new ship's cat aboard the tall masted schooner Lynx, a fitting heir to a proud tradition. While
there are still working cats today, for the most part today cats are kept companionship not for
controlling mice and rats, and that tradition actually dates all the way back to Roman times,
where Romans used domesticated weasels to catch rats, but kept cats as treasured pets. At some
points in history cats have faced gross discrimination, they were sometimes killed
wholesale at various times, and in various places because of their supposed connection to witches.
And yet cats are still enormously popular today, as anyone who follows social media can attest.
And while worldwide more households have dogs, households with cats tend to have more animals,
and so house cats far outnumber pet dogs in the world today. A fitting
homage to the underappreciated role that felis silvestris catus, is played in human history.
I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history 5 to 10 minutes long. And if you did enjoy it please
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