Into the Stacks

Sunday, 16 July 2017

neurodivergent-crow: who knew snorlax was dairy-powered?

neurodivergent-crow:

who knew snorlax was dairy-powered?

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Cats are an extreme outlier among domestic animals

Cats are an extreme outlier among domestic animals:

moontyger:

Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Ottoni and his colleagues report that five distinct clades of ancient wildcats rapidly spread outward from relatively small origin points. Over millennia, the clade from Egypt and Southwest Asia began to dominate the world. Mostly this was due to the spread of agriculture. Farming practices that began in the Levant and Western Asia took hold elsewhere, attracting rodents to grain stores. That, in turn, attracted wildcats, who eventually joined farming communities as companions—just as ancient dogs had joined hunting parties in the Paleolithic.

Then the researchers started to see weird data points, like an Egyptian cat at a Viking sea port during the Middle Ages, and Asian cats at a Roman Red Sea port during the height of the Roman Empire.

They realized that many of these cats were spreading along shipping routes. During classical antiquity, ships’ captains always kept a cat aboard to remove vermin. By the medieval period, it was unlawful in some places to sail without a ship’s cat. As time went on, these cats escaped in ports far from home. There, they would interbreed with local cats. Eventually, the genes of the Egyptian and southwest Asian clades began to win out over others.

Nobody is certain why Egyptian cats were especially popular, but it may have been because of their friendly dispositions. The researchers note that the ancient world’s obsession with Egyptian cats was so intense that it became a political issue, and a “local ban on cat trading [was] imposed in Egypt as early as 1700 BCE.” Still, Egyptian cats continued to “spread to most of the Old World.” Over time, Mediterranean house cats were all from the Egyptian clade.

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Test Your Knowledge of Jane Austen’s Life — and Afterlife

Test Your Knowledge of Jane Austen’s Life — and Afterlife:

scvpubliclib:

As Janeites around the world pay tribute to Jane Austen on the 200th anniversary of her death, test your knowledge of Austen’s life (and afterlife) with this quiz.

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