August 29, 2026 • 53 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the oldest known evidence of domesticated cats on the isle of Cyprus, as well as tales of St. Nicholas of the Cats, also associated with the island. (originally published 8/7/2025)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday, so we have another rerun
for you here today. This is an episode that originally
published 8-7-2025. It is Cats of Cyprus. In this episode,
we discuss the oldest known evidence of domesticated cats on
the Isle of Cyprus, as well as tales of St.
Nicholas of the Cats, also associated with the island. All right,
(00:29):
let's do it.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
And I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
And we're continuing Cat Week here on Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. If you are not aware, it is Cat Week,
a celebration of cats in our own weird stuff to
blow your mind, and eventually Weird House Cinema Manor. In
this episode, we're going to be talking about, to a
large extent, the domestication of cats. And when we think
(01:09):
about the oldest human civilizations to value the domestic cat,
I think a lot of us tend to, in many ways,
rightfully think about the ancient Egyptians. After all, the ancient
Egyptians held the cat in high esteem, living with them,
depicting them in their art, casting gods in their likeness.
and of course, sometimes mummifying their remains. So you'd be
(01:31):
quite excused, I think, if you came into this episode
assuming that ancient Egypt provided us with the earliest evidence
of domesticated cats. And in fact, up until, I mean,
reasonably recently, like the early 2000s, but certainly recent enough
that it occurred on the the other end of a
lot of our schooling, this was exactly what was assumed
(01:55):
based on evidence from something like 3,600 years ago concerning
the domestication of the Near Eastern and Egyptian populations of
the African wildcat. But then in the early 2000s, as
we'll be discussing, new archaeological findings pointed researchers to a
new possible location for the oldest known evidence of domesticated cats,
(02:16):
and that is on the Isle of Cyprus. For those
of you who trying to pull up the map in
your own head, or perhaps, you know, opening another window
on whatever device you're at, maybe I'll save you a
trip and a little brain power. The Mediterranean island of
Cyprus is the third largest Mediterranean island after Sicily and Sardinia.
And it was first settled by hunter-gatherers approximately 13,000 years ago.
(02:40):
And it's been uniquely situated over the millennia to experience
cultural exchange with Europe, Africa, and Asia, shaping the Cypriot culture.
And so, as we'll discuss, it's possible that evidence of
domesticated cats does indeed go back some 9,500 years. And,
of course, then some, maybe, to ancient humans in Cyprus.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
But before we get to the archaeological evidence for cats
as human companions on the island of Cyprus, I thought
we should briefly look at the question, how did cats
become domesticated? Where does the cat come from? So my
main source here is a paper by Otoni et al.,
Claudio Otoni and co-authors, published in the journal Nature, Ecology,
(03:26):
and Evolution in 2017, and it's called The Paleogenetics of
Cat Dispersal in the Ancient World. The top line here,
is the discovery, and this wasn't always known, because there
are a number of different wildcat subvarieties you find around
the world. There's a European wildcat, there is a Central
(03:47):
Asian wildcat, different wildcats you find all over the place.
And so it was not always known where the domesticated
cat came from. But now researchers can say with a
pretty high degree of confidence that all domesticated cats were
are thought to descend from an original population of wild
cats native to North Africa and Southwest Asia known as
(04:12):
Felis sylvestris libica or the African wild cat. So the
cats that are domestic cats around the world originally come
from the subgroup of the African wild cats. And there
appear to have been two waves of domestication. So the
authors of this paper, Atoni et al., they studied cat
(04:32):
DNA collected from all around the globe. And they determined
through genetic analysis that cat domestication started first in the
Fertile Crescent. That's the earliest time in the Neolithic period.
That's the last part of the Stone Age. And then
it accelerated in Egypt in the first millennium BCE.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
So we can still basically look at our household cats
and think of them as being descendants of the goddess Bastet.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Right, or bast.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
So there's a lot of Egyptian heritage to the domestic
cat species.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
It does seem like ancient Egyptian civilization does contribute hugely
to the domestic cats of today, but ancient Egypt was
not the first time cats were domesticated. That seems to
be in the Fertile Crescent a little bit earlier in
the Neolithic period.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
But maybe the last time they would be domesticated, because
it seems like we're done. It seems like we're at
a good level with the current domestication of the common
house cat.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
I think they're here to stay.
Speaker 4 (05:31):
But speaking of the idea that a domestication attempt of
an animal could not stick around, I was reading about
an interesting variation in a paper by an author that
we'll come back to several times in this episode. A
paper by Jean-Denis Vignier and a bunch of co-authors from
PLOS One in 2016 called Earliest Domestic Cats in China
(05:57):
Identified as Leopard Cat. So in this paper, the authors
agree that all domestic cats today are descended from the
African wildcat. So it's not a dispute about like the
leopard cat being a part of the genetic heritage of,
you know, any cat that you would find in a
house today. Instead, this paper documents archaeological remains from China
(06:22):
dating from between 5500 to 4900 years before present. showing
what appear to be domesticated cats buried in human contexts,
so found in human storage areas or dwellings. And analysis
of the bones of these animals shows that these are
not African wildcats, but rather from a historically short-lived attempt
(06:48):
to domesticate the Asian leopard cat, now an extant wild animal.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Wow, that is fascinating. Yeah, I mean, you think about
We tend to think about the domestication success stories. And
with the cat, I think we're still figuring out how
successful that was. I know I had my own household
cat just pee all over the place this morning. So
it definitely gave me some time for a few sidebars
(07:17):
as I was finishing the research for this episode. It's like,
have we... Have we reached a good point with this domestication?
I'm not sure. But clearly there are cases where there's
even less of a match and where not enough lines
up in short enough time for the domestication to really
take hold.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Well, yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
I mean, I guess you're sort of asking this question now,
but yeah, it raises the question, like, what counts as domesticated? Like,
how sticky does the relationship have to be between the
humans and these animals for it to really be domesticated? Because, yeah,
in the case of these semi-domesticated or proto-domesticated leopard cats,
the practice appears to have died out. There's not like
(07:56):
a widespread, you know, population of domesticated leopard cat descendants.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Yeah, I imagine there are a number of different elements
like the cultural attachment, religious significance. And then just, is
it useful? Like, are they serving a purpose in the
household or on, you know, or on the land surrounding
the household? Are they killing the enemies of man and
so forth?
Speaker 4 (08:19):
I have to wonder, I don't have direct evidence of this,
but I have to wonder if the spread of the
domesticated African wildcat descendant could have possibly replaced, you know,
previous attempts to domesticate cats or cat-like animals.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
That's a good point. Yeah, because if you're kind of
like putting in a lot of work to try and
domesticate these leopards and then someone shows up with something
maybe a little more closely aligned to what we think
of as a modern house cat, yeah, you might be
inclined to think, well, heck, let's just go with this.
This model seems to work.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
So how did domestic cats come to cover the entire globe?
Since the African wildcat is native to North Africa and
the Middle East, how did it spread all over the world?
Atoni et al. determined by looking at DNA from cat remains,
especially in major ancient port cities. that domestic cats spread
(09:19):
around the world on ships. It had to have been
by sea travel that they made it from place to
place and eventually basically to the whole world. And they argued,
I think this makes a lot of sense, that they
were probably kept aboard ships to kill rats and mice
that would otherwise get into food stashes during transport. And
this will be a theme, actually. You know, it's funny
(09:42):
how A lot of people listening probably today do not
think of the cat as a functional or working animal.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
It's a companion animal.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
You have a cat to be friends with it, to
feel nice when you're petting it and taking care of it,
to feel good just you know, getting that reciprocal relationship
of companionship and mutual enjoyment with another creature. But for
much of history, the cat had a job to do.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Absolutely. And, you know, I don't know, I still think
about this. I think of my cat primarily as a
companion animal. But You know, there are times where, you know,
I live near some railroad tracks. There's always, there are
rodents out there. And so it does cross my mind
from time to time that she is also kind of
like the last line of defense. That if rodents enter
(10:31):
the house, it's her job to take care of it.
And if not, I will satirize her with poetry so hard. Well,
you better be careful you don't summon the king of cats. Well, yeah,
we're not going to drag him into this. I'm going
to just target Mochi, my cat, with that.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Oh, right.
Speaker 4 (10:49):
I forgot what Sean Chan did. Did he not satirize
cats hard enough to invite the king of cats just
to protect them? Did he actually have to satirize the
king of cats himself?
Speaker 1 (11:00):
He went straight to the king of cats. Cats are
under his jurisdiction, and cats have failed me in not
eating the mice that ate this egg that I was
going to eat.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Yeah, yeah. Okay. He went straight to the top. Run
in his mouth about the boss. That's a bad idea.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
Oh, but this all brings us back to the connection
between cats and the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean.
Because as you were alluding to earlier, Rob, it seems
that our earliest archaeological evidence of cat-human companionship may be
in an ancient Stone Age grave on the island of Cyprus.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
And so we're going to We're going to skip over
Egyptian cats here and mostly focus on Cyprus. But I
do want to note that we could easily come back
in another episode, maybe next Cat Week, maybe sooner, and
discuss the ancient Egyptians and their cats. But again, this
was an important find. This really changed the way we
understood humanity's relationships. with domesticated or nearly domesticated felines. And again,
(12:04):
this is the work of French scientist Jean-Denis Vignier of
the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, along
with his co-authors. The big initial paper was Early Taming
of the Cat in Cyprus, published in 2004 in the
journal Science. And it essentially set the clock back, I believe,
like a good 5,000 years on what we've understood about
(12:28):
humanity's relationship with the domesticated cat. So this is essentially
how it went down. And Joe, we were both looking
at the same sources here, so jump in if you
want to expand on anything that I'm mentioning here. But essentially,
the researchers discovered a mostly complete skeleton. And I want
to add the caveat that it seems to have been
(12:50):
buried in complete form. It's just parts of the skeleton
were damaged at some point or another.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
And the fact that it's in complete form is important
for reasons we'll get into in a minute.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Exactly, yes. So, mostly complete skeleton of an eight-month-old cat
next to the 9,500-year-old grave of a human being. And
this grave was located in the Chalurukambas archaeological site. This
is a pre-pottery Neolithic bee site. I'm to understand this
(13:21):
was a settlement occupied from the end of the 9th
till the end of the 8th millennium BCE. And this
is in southern Cyprus, a site that had been first
excavated just a decade earlier. And this would have been
one of the Neolithic people that had traveled from the mainland,
bringing knowledge. crops and livestock to Cyprus. Not individually, one
(13:42):
of the people. I mean, more broadly, like the people,
the strain of humanity that came to the island. Right.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
So sometime previous, in the previous few thousand years, there
had been settlers from the mainland, originally occupants of somewhere
in the Fertile Crescent, who were Stone Age humans that
got in boats and made their way to the island.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah, yeah. So This particular human that was buried, again,
alongside this cat, was apparently about 30 when they died.
And they were buried with various items, which is always
interesting to see what kind of items they were buried with,
or at least the ones we know about because they've
survived in one.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Form or another.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
And it consisted of a marine shell, a stone pendant,
a flint scraper, two small polished axes, and I think
one of those was damaged, a pumice stone, a fragment
of ochre, a large flint-piercing tool, and then several flint blades.
So a lot of, you know, utilitarian tools on their body.
They'd probably been buried in a bag, placed in a
(14:45):
circular pit that also contained various additional shells and stones.
The cat's grave was oval-shaped and about 15 centimeters deep.
The body was seemingly, again, complete at burial, though parts
of it were destroyed, I believe, by plowing, because it
was like the uppermost bones that had been damaged here.
And the cat was laid out on its side, head
(15:07):
to the west and back to the south. That happens
to be the exact same positioning as the human buried
beside it. The cause of death for the feline could
not be determined, but evidence suggested that it had not
been cut, had not been burned. Its body had not
been opened up. Gender of the cat was unknown due
to missing or destroyed pelvic bone pieces.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
So we don't know if the cat died of natural
causes or was killed, but the evidence of its death
was not clear.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
It's entirely possible that it could have been killed as
a sacrifice and buried alongside the human. But there's no
evidence that that happened. There's no evidence that that didn't happen. And,
you know, it's not like either possibility really alters the
argument for this animal being important to the person it's
buried with. I mean, either way. It has a privileged
(15:59):
position alongside the human or vice versa. The human has
a privileged position alongside the cat. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Well, and the the really important thing here being that
it's clear to the archaeologists that this cat was intentionally
buried on purpose. This is it's not a situation where like, oh,
a cat was running around and it just happened to
die near the grave and they're mistaking it for me.
And there were several reasons for thinking. that this is
an intentional burial alongside the human, not just the proximity,
(16:27):
it is right beside the other grave, but also you
mentioned the fact that the cat's skeleton was articulated, meaning
like the joints were still connected and intact, basically.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
And Meunier also points out that the mere fact that
it was buried like this, articulated, almost entirely intact, if
not entirely intact, means it was likely a tame species.
Because when wild animals were rarely buried during this time,
the skeletons were generally rather incomplete. So just everything about
(16:59):
the way this creature has been buried and the way
it's positioned and so forth, it seems to indicate that
this animal was likely domesticated to some degree. And we
should also note that these findings, Vignier backs up by
pointing to various other cat remains found, at least in
pieces elsewhere on the island. And, uh, and also the idea,
(17:20):
he mentions the idea that cats had special status, um,
among these individuals was also, is also backed up by
the discovery of figurines in neighboring regions from this time,
as well as a one that was found at the
same archeological site in Cyprus though, from a slightly earlier time.
So everything seems in place here to suggest, yeah, a
tame cat, a cat that is, that is considered close
(17:43):
to humans for one reason or another. We'll get into
more about, you know, some of those reasons. and also
by a culture that values the cat enough to create
its likeness. Again, maybe for religious purposes, maybe for some
other purpose, but they certainly held the cat in high esteem.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
Now, another thing that would be interesting to know is,
do we know what kind of cat this was?
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Yes, yeah. So, Vignier contends that the, quote, the post-cranial
and cranial measurements fall in the upper half of the
range variation of size of the Western Asian Felis sylvestris libica.
So this does seem to be the African wildcat. And
I'm only just now realizing that the cartoon cat Sylvester
(18:32):
gets its name probably from this.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Well, I think the name Sylvester means like from the
forest or of the woods, though I assume that's what
it means in the context of this cat's name as well.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
The cartoon cat?
Speaker 4 (18:45):
Well, the real species and the cartoon I don't know
about the cartoon cat. That probably just, yeah, maybe that
comes from this.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
But anyway, this does seem to be the African wild cat. Uh,
so the ancestor of the domestic cat, um, though this
would of course have been the earlier domestication wave, not the,
the one that really took hold. Uh, and this specimen
was apparently bigger than a modern domestic cat, uh, had
longer limbs. Um, but it is definitely, uh, uh, an
(19:13):
African wild cat. Uh, points out that there's no evidence
of a native field species of cat on Cyprus. So
they would have had to have been introduced by these
Neolithic settlers. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
And I'll have more on that in just a minute.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
So this updated timeline would put the domestication just 3,000
years after the likely domestication point of the dog and
alongside the human domestication of the sheep, mastery of wheat
as well. So I think settlers of Catan fans out
there will recognize that this is just one stone short
of getting to buy a development car. So this is
a big deal when it comes to the advancement of
(19:48):
your civilization.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
But does it help you with the longest road?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Nope.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
You're going to need, what, bricks and wood for that.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
Now, just a note about the timeline of dog domestication,
because I think reading about the timeline of dog domestication
can be confusing sometimes because While the earliest undisputed archaeological
evidence of a dog buried with humans comes from the
15th millennium before present, so that's from a site in
(20:17):
modern Germany, genetic evidence shows that modern domestic dogs began
to diverge from their wolf ancestors something like 20,000 to
40,000 years ago. I think there are some different figures
on that, but that's a commonly cited range. So genetic
evidence shows the process beginning much earlier, but the genetic
(20:38):
evidence doesn't tell us exactly how domesticated those proto-dogs or
divergent wolves were in terms of behavior and living arrangements.
So for example, it could be that for thousands of years,
these proto-dogs were only partially domesticated, not necessarily treated as companions,
but genetically and behaviorally adapted to increased.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Interaction with human populations.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
One example of this would be following humans around and
scavenging their camps. So yeah, the truth is we don't
know exactly when people started treating dogs like pets or
like working animals, but the first clear archaeological evidence for
that kind of relationship comes from the 15th millennium B.C.
And again, like with the cat example, that's from an
(21:26):
example of humans being buried along with their dog. I
think it's from a couple being buried with their dog.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
It's also confusing because sometimes we use BP in measuring
this because we're saying before Pluto, before Pluto, the Disney
cartoon dog. So it's essentially the same, but it's off by.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
A few decades.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
So apart from the proximity to a human grave, One
clue that the cat skeleton found at Shiluro Kambos might
have been a domesticated cat begins with the observation that,
as you said a minute ago, Rob, the African wildcat
was not native to Cyprus before the arrival of humans.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
That's worth stressing.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
There were no wildcats on Cyprus at all. And we
know that pretty conclusively from the fossil record.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
No cats. In fact.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
The fossil record indicates that before humans, there were very
few terrestrial mammals at all on Cyprus. This is probably
because even during glacial maximum periods, when the sea levels
were at their lowest, Cyprus was never connected to the mainland.
So the only pre-human terrestrial mammals on Cyprus appear to
(22:41):
have been the following. One was The dwarf hippopotamus, this
seems to have gone extinct when humans arrived, which was
about 12,500 years before present. So they were very likely
hunted or otherwise driven extinct by humans. The dwarf elephant
also disappeared when we showed up. The Cypriot genet, which
(23:01):
is a small carnivore, sort of a cat-like, weasel-like creature,
a little.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Bit raccoony maybe. It's got a long tail.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
May have survived a few thousand years after humans arrived,
but it is now extinct. And then finally, the Cypriot mouse,
which is the only native land mammal from.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Cyprus that still exists today.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
And, you know, that's quite a compliment for the Cypriot
mouse to have survived, given what is about to follow.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
Well, mice are hardy, but yeah, when humans show up
on an island, we do a lot of damage, especially
us and the things we bring with us.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Oh, do you think humans are the reason that the
hippopotamus and the elephant disappeared? It's just a coincidence, I assume, right?
Speaker 4 (23:43):
So since cats were not native to the island and
thus not acquired locally, we know that ancient humans, and
these would have been Stone Age farmers originally from the
Fertile Crescent, must have crossed the sea with cats in
their boats. And given the size of the boats that
would have been used, and given the fact that you
(24:04):
need multiple breeding pairs to establish a stable island population,
it's just not very plausible that we could be dealing
with the case of cat stowaways that establish themselves on
an island. That's not, I don't know, it's not impossible,
but it seems very unlikely.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Especially because, you know, to be clear, over the course
of time, unlikely introductions do occur. We see that, especially
when you go beyond the span of human civilizations and
you look at just like, you know, more like geologic time.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
But this is not millions of years, right? This is
not millions of years.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
This is within the range of human domain. And it
suspiciously involves an animal that humans took a liking to.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
So it seems much more likely that humans brought cats
to Cyprus across the sea on purpose.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
But why? Well, one clue is that cats.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
Were not the only non-native animal species introduced by humans.
So here I want to reference another paper, again, where
Jean Denis Vignier is the first author. This one is
called Historical Dynamics of the Human-Environment Interactions in Cyprus During
the 12th to 10th Millennium Before or Present, the Last
(25:23):
30 Years of Contributions of the Amathus Area. This was
published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports in the
year 2023, once again.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
By Vignet et al.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
So in this paper, the authors are actually looking at
a lot of different stuff. They're tracking what we know
about how the physical environment of Cyprus changed before, during,
and after its early colonization by humans. And they look at, quote,
(26:03):
birth and evolution of the commensal fauna, e.g. mice, cats,
and crows. And commensal fauna means things living alongside. Commensalism
in biology is typically, it's a type of symbiotic relationship
in which one organism gets a benefit and the other
is not really affected one way or another. And then
(26:24):
the list goes on. Local domestication of wild boar and goats,
adaptation and intensification of cultivation and breeding to the local environments.
So to zoom in specifically on the introduction of new
animal species, the authors write that the first introduction we
have evidence of is actually the wild boar, which was
(26:45):
established on the island during the Epipaleolithic, probably as hunting stock.
So the boar remains found on Cyprus show insular dwarfism,
meaning that they're about 15% smaller than the mainland variety.
And they were often wounded with arrowheads. So this would
be an interesting early case of intentional animal management or
(27:10):
game management. Bringing a live stock of a wild species
to an island to release so that it can establish
itself there and so you can hunt it on the island.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Yeah, yeah. This is fascinating to think about because I
know for my own part, I often think about this
more when I'm thinking about.
Europeans, you know, setting off during the Age of Discovery
and as well as the expansion, you know, of Polynesia
(27:43):
and Micronesia and so forth, seafaring folks coming to an
island and realizing, hey, nice island here, but there's nothing
to eat here. I better leave some pigs. I better
leave some goats. And then I can come back and
this island will be my larder. But, you know, clearly
this has been in the human playbook for a very
long time.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Right.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
I mean, this is like thousands of years before I
imagined there was such a practice.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:07):
So seeding, yes, seeding an island with a new game
species that can be hunted for generations to come. But
then well after the introduction of the boar during the
11th millennium before present, we get other mammals appearing. And
this includes domestic dogs brought from the Levant, the Western
European house mouse. And cats, this would be the African wildcat,
(28:29):
as we've been talking about. Now to clarify, there is
no evidence that the wildcats brought along were initially treated
as companions or had any special significance to humans. That
evidence would start to appear more than a thousand years
later with that human-cat co-burial. So why were cats brought?
(28:51):
The authors here argue that it was likely that African
wildcats were brought to Cyprus in as an already semi-domesticated
commensal species that were valued for pest control. Because if
you are a farming society and you take foods, you
take grain or other food somewhere with you, it is
(29:11):
pretty much a guarantee that rodents are sneaking along for
the ride or that there are already rodents where you're going.
And either way, they're going to get into your food.
Rodent attacks on human food caches are just a perennial
problem for human cultures going back as far as we
have evidence. So if these cute, moody, little carnivorous critters,
(29:33):
these cats, already like to hang out around your villages
and kill the mice, it is definitely worth bringing some
of them along with you when you move to a
new place across the sea. So these early cats were
probably intentionally brought to Cyprus for the purpose of pest control.
And then after this, well, around the same time, maybe
(29:55):
a few hundred years later, we start to see some
other things, goats and cattle being Goats seem to have
been treated not as domestic animals initially, but as wild
game stocks. So kind of like the boars like hunted
for some time, uh, wild on the Island before they
were either domesticated or re domesticated on the Island. They may,
they may have been domesticated earlier on the mainland and
(30:15):
then released wild on the Island. Um, but eventually they
get re domesticated or domesticated for the first time. Then
after this, we start to see more introductions. You get, um,
Fallow deer, again, brought and established as a wild population
and then hunted domestic sheep. And then, curiously, I thought
this was so interesting, foxes.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Foxes. Foxes.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
Not native to the island of Cyprus. They were not
there on their own. They had to have been brought
by humans. It is hard to imagine foxes could establish
themselves by accident, like just stowing away in boats, right?
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Again, you need... You need.
Speaker 4 (30:54):
Multiple breeding pairs to have a stable population there. How
would you get enough foxes to the island? It's harder
for foxes to steal away than it is for mice,
I think.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
And why bring them? Like, I don't know, this seems
along the lines of, say, intentionally introducing raccoons to the side.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
To get into your trash cans.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Yeah, like, I mean, and I imagine folks living with
urban foxes probably see that as a more direct comparison. Yeah,
but like, why bring the foxes?
Speaker 4 (31:25):
The authors say we don't know. We don't know why
they brought the foxes. Maybe this is just a guess.
So there's not a reason to think this. You're just
having to guess. Maybe foxes had some kind of cultural
or religious significance to the settlers, possibly. The physical evidence
indicates that foxes were not hunted and they were tolerated
as commensals in the early Cypriot villages. The authors say, quote,
(31:49):
this also strengthens the idea that early Neolithic people were
experimenting with with a lot of different systems of relationships
with animals. So just try it out.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Why not?
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Yeah, I mean, if you think about the idea of
bringing cats with you, and these cats are not necessarily
your friends, they just live in the same area, and
they eat something, they kill something that is useful to
you that they're killing them.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Enemy of my enemy, yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, so maybe something similar with foxes. They're like, we
have seen the foxes eat mice or something that we
don't want around. They seem to have a meaningful purpose,
so let's just bring them along.
Speaker 4 (32:29):
Yeah, I wonder, yeah, could foxes have possibly been thought
of as pest control? I don't know how plausible that is.
Somebody who has more experience with foxes, please write in
about that. Is that plausible that they were a complementary
pest control system, possibly? Once again, I want to make clear,
the authors don't say that.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
We don't know.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Yeah, and it seems to me, anyway, that it, like,
The discovery that any of these introductions could backfire on
us is a pretty recent revelation for human beings. So
maybe I'm wrong. Maybe earlier civilizations did realize that they
could blow it, introducing animals intentionally for one purpose, and
(33:08):
then it just doesn't work out. But either way, they
had to have some reason to bring them there. And
it's fascinating to try and guess what that could have been.
They just like the look of them, maybe.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:20):
Well, I would not dismiss the idea of people simply
liking the look of cats in the gradual evolution of
the cat from a working animal, you know, a commensal
tolerated because of their pest control capabilities into becoming a
companion animal that you would want to have sit in
your lap and pet and feed and have buried alongside you.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah, yeah. And I imagine another thing you could factor
in is, as always, how cute do the pups look?
How cute do the kittens look?
Speaker 3 (33:47):
And so forth.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
I mean, that has been a major factor with dogs
and cats and various other animals. If they kind of
look like human babies, if they get that cute response
out of us, then that has a benefit to us,
but it also really benefits the animal that we're inevitably
trying to domesticate.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Baby foxes are quite cute, I imagine. I'm not summoning
an image to my mind right off the bat, but
I'm just going to assume they're very cute to look at.
So maybe that's part of it.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
But how this relationship evolved on Stone Age Cyprus, we
don't know.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
We can only speculate.
Speaker 4 (34:35):
But, Rob, you had some other stuff on Cats in
Cyprus from more recent history, right?
Speaker 3 (34:41):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
There are are still domesticated cats on the Isle of Cyprus,
which should not come as a surprise to anyone because
domesticated cats are everywhere now.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
They're hard to shake loose.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Yeah, yeah. Again, they're here to stay. I think this
is the last domestication of the African wildcat. And there's
apparently no known connection between all the cats you'll find
there on Cyprus today and the so-called ancient Cypriot wildcat
this initial wave of domestication that we see in the
(35:13):
archaeological record there. But the Cypress cat is a designated
domestic cat breed found on the island. Again, just a
breed of domestic cat, sometimes called the St. Helen cat
and sometimes called the St. Nicholas cat.
Speaker 4 (35:30):
So if you hear those two things, they're the same animal.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
But I want to walk through the saintly connections here.
And in this, we're going to be dealing more with
a lot of legends and some fact, but certainly less science.
So let's discuss this St. Helen connection first. This refers
to Helena of Constantinople, who would have lived 246 or
(35:56):
248 through 330 CE, mother of Constantine I. And she does, again,
an actual historic person here. who does, it does seem
like she may have spent some time in Cyprus, as
it was under her patronage. And the legend here is
that she imported hundreds of cats from Egypt or Persia
(36:20):
or Palestine. The exacts on this seem to vary. I've
seen various sources that point to different places. But somewhere
that had cats, she, according to this legend, shipped them in,
like a thousand or so. And this would have been
in the 4th century CE. And the purpose of was
to rid the monastery there, which she founded, of snakes.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
There are a lot of legends about the travels and
pilgrimages of St.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
Helen.
Speaker 4 (36:49):
I know it said also that didn't she make a
journey to find the true cross?
Speaker 3 (36:54):
Well, there was a lot of that going on. Yes.
She was at least one of the people who found
the true cross. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
So take all of these legends with at least a
grain of salt, you know, especially when we're dealing with
saints from this era, like This is where you can
potentially run into the problem of, like, this person has,
there are too many relics out there. There are more
relics than she had bones. Not specifically in this case,
but that sort of thing can sometimes occur. There's a
(37:20):
lot of legends that build up around these individuals, even
though at the core we're dealing with an actual human
being who existed. So, snakes. Yes, Cyprus is home to
numerous snake species, venomous and non-venomous. There's one that's actually
called the cat snake. And there's a there's one called
the Cyprus whip snake. And this one is endemic to Cyprus.
(37:44):
But this is the legend that the the monastery had
a snake problem. And so St. Helena brings in a
bunch of cats or has cats brought in, according to
the slate.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
I was just picturing her trying to bring them all herself.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
Oh, God, yes.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
I mean, trying to bring one would be a task.
I don't even want to imagine the effort. It's like
load up the ship with a thousand cats. That's going
to be a pretty gross ship by the time you
get over. But according to the Slade article, the Holy
Monastery of St. Nicholas of the Cats solved a snake
problem with felines. This is by Eric Grundhauser. I also
(38:22):
looked at the website of the author, Charlotte Riggle, charloteriggle.com.
She has some materials on this. And basically, legend has
it that Cyprus was in the midst of an epic
drought at the time. I've seen it, given an account
of like 37 years of drought. And it's just driving
the snakes indoors in search of water. And mainly, it's
(38:44):
running them into the monastery. So they're trying to do
the Lord's work in there, but there are just too
many snakes. Somebody's got to do something about these snakes.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
Sounds like the sub to a... I don't know, ancient
snakes on a plane prequel? Snakes in a monastery?
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Essentially, the legend makes it sound like that level of infestation.
Like it's just completely out of control and it's driving
people off the island. Like people are leaving Cyprus because
there are just too many snakes.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
Popping out of the holy water basin. Yeah. Dangling from
the ceiling.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Yeah, so this led me to... to wonder a little bit, like,
is this at all reasonable? Like, is this just purely legendary?
Is it possible that snakes would get this out of control?
I mean, one potentially, one way to think about this
is that we should mention that this is not the
only tidbit from the ancient world about snake infestations getting
(39:36):
out of control or particular problem snakes interfering with the
machinations of various rulers. There are various accounts of plagues
of serpents, of course, descriptions of foreign lands and enemy
battlefields that are infested with snakes and other undesired creatures.
And of course, a lot of that you can think
(39:57):
about from various angles, like how do you want to
insult the land of foreigners? You can just say, oh,
it's just nothing but snakes and scorpions everywhere.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
Yeah, a lot of these, they just sound like obvious exaggeration.
Though then again, I don't want to say it provides
any evidence that this particular story is true, but we
have talked on the show before about great gatherings of snakes,
like at the, uh, the Narcissus, uh, how do we
pronounce it? The Narcissa or Narcissus snake dens in Canada.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
Once again, to be clear, I'm not saying like, oh,
that's what's happening here. And therefore the story is true,
but snakes can gather in massive numbers.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
I mean, anyone who's ever been around snakes, you know
that yes, snakes do enter into human areas, right? And
when they do, given the place that snakes hold in
our minds, you know, the threat that snakes can pose
to us, the fact that we are often frightened by snakes,
(40:59):
and also all of the layers of meaning that we
attribute to snakes, all of this makes it meaningful when
a snake is where we don't think a snake should be.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Yeah. Yeah. This is magic. This is a curse.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
I was looking around for other examples. It honestly gets
a little confusing at times looking for even legendary histories
that are referring to snake infestations. One reason I found
is that there are certain works of Mormon apologetics out
there that talk about some of this. There is apparently
(41:36):
an incident in the Book of Mormon that involves a
serpent infestation, and so Some, at least some of these
works of apologetics, like attempt to back this up with
other examples from ancient history. As with any work of apologetics,
we often have to take that with a grain of
salt because obviously, you know, it's an attempt to back
up certain ideas with an interpretation of reality.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:58):
Religious apologetics being one of the most straightforward forms of
motivated reasoning.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
But not without value as literature.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
I mean, it can still point you to these real examples,
but it doesn't necessarily prove that you know, the story
they're using it as evidence for.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Now, this one doesn't involve a bunch of snakes. It
just involves one giant snake. But it involves the adventures
of Roman General Marcus Attilius Regulus during the First Punic War.
His troops are said to have encountered a giant snake,
and it just became like a whole battle, like essentially
(42:33):
a kaiju battle.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Wait, where are you saying? On Cyprus?
Speaker 1 (42:37):
No, no, this is elsewhere in the ancient world.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Oh, okay, sorry, sorry.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
This was not on Cyprus, but just an example of
a snake showing up in another legend about, again, another
historic individual. Though in this case, it is not mentioned
in the primary histories. For instance, it's not in the
writings of Polybius about the Punic Wars. It's in sort
of secondary sources, and it's thought to just generally be
(43:01):
a legend, a tall tale about how great this guy was.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
I see.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
Now, elsewhere in legends and tall tales about holy places
infested by snakes, there are a couple of stories that
popped up. And I realize, yes, we're getting a little
far away from cats here. But these were too fascinating
to not cover on the show. So from the 7th
century CE, there is the story of St. Hilda's Abbey.
(43:27):
This is in Yorkshire, in Britain. This is also the
area where Count Dracula moves to, in Bram Stoker's Dracula,
by the way.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Oh, interesting.
Speaker 4 (43:36):
Did I forget about, in the novel, does he not
actually come directly to London? He goes somewhere up in
the north?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
I believe so. Now, I haven't actually read Dracula in
a number of years. I've mostly been watching various cinematic
adaptations that drift pretty far from the source at times.
But there does seem to be a Dracula connection here,
very loosely, but I'm going to mention it. So the
idea here is that St. Hilda's Abbey was infested by
(44:03):
snakes until Hilda of Whitby, Turn them to stone with,
I guess, holy magic. And there's actually a science tie-in
to this legend, though, as it seems to be a
strong case for geomythology here. in order to explain the
presence of fossilized ammonites in the area. Now, you can
(44:23):
look up images of ammonites here if you're not instantly
recognizing them. But once you see them, you go like, oh, yes, that.
I've seen that fossil many times. You know, it essentially
has the look. It does look like something curled up.
It can easily be mistaken for a curled up serpent
or a curled up centipede or something that has been fossilized.
Speaker 4 (44:41):
Yeah, ammonites were cephalopods that lived in the sea that
went extinct, the KPG extinction, along with the non-avian dinosaurs.
But yeah, the fossils will be basically a spiral shell
because they had a spiral shell shape, kind of like
nautiluses today. But from what I understand, they're more closely
related to some other species than the nautiluses, but look
(45:02):
superficially similar. And yeah, and you can still find lots
of fossils of these shells. I remember coming across... ammonite
fossils and reading about the discovery of a lot of
ammonite fossils on the Jurassic Coast in England when I
was there.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
So you can imagine folks running across these and thinking,
these look like snakes that have been turned to stone.
And then to add an extra layer here, and kind
of getting back to apologetics to a certain extent, you
have examples where these ammonites have then been carved, a
little serpent's head. or something that's supposed to be a
(45:37):
serpent's head, has been carved at the very end of
the creature to make it look like it is a snake.
And you can look images up of this online as well.
The one I found here I shared with you, Joe,
looks so much like the sandworms from Beetlejuice. But except friendlier.
It doesn't have sharp teeth. It's going, hi, hello. Yeah,
(45:59):
he doesn't look as fearsome. He looks a little duck-like.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
I'm just a little snake.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Now, there's another legend I ran across. This is the
legend of the monastery of Langovarda in Greece, located on
the island of Cephalonia, in which the snakes are said
to have actually defended the monastery against pirates in, I believe, 1705.
Speaker 3 (46:30):
That's my kind of story. I like that.
Speaker 4 (46:33):
I like a trap for intruders that involves animals, like
a pit, a moat with piranhas in it, a pit
full of snakes, something like that.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Crab pit?
Speaker 3 (46:42):
Crab pit. That'd be really good.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Well, in this case, it was snakes protecting nuns that
were living there at the time. And then afterwards, these
snakes find Christ. They become holy snakes. Sometimes said to
have crosses on their heads. And then they show up.
At the monastery, it said in the days leading up
to August 15th, the Feast of the Dormition of the
(47:05):
Virgin Mary. So essentially right now, this place is sometimes
called the Monastery of the Virgin Mary of the Snakes.
You can look up pictures of these snakes, too. I
don't know. I'm not seeing the cross on their foreheads
so much. But, you know, this is more of an
article of faith rather than a matter of herpetology.
Speaker 4 (47:28):
Okay, well, I have really enjoyed this snake hunt, but
does this inform our attempt to answer the question, is
there any historical truth to the idea of St. Helena
bringing a bunch of snakes to the monastery in Cyprus? Sorry,
not snakes, bringing cats to the monastery to get rid
of the snakes.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
I don't know that it actually provides us with additional answers,
but I guess I'll just come back to it. When
you're dealing with snakes, a snake is just such a
loaded creature. We have so many thoughts about the snakes,
so many layers of meaning with the snake. And so
the legends just pile up. But yeah, there are other
accounts of snake infestations being a thing. And, you know,
(48:09):
we do see examples of, there are places in the
world where snakes do become a problem, especially when you're dealing,
I mean, mainly when you're dealing with venomous snakes. Because
a non-venomous snake is essentially going to do as good,
if not more good, than having a cat around. I mean,
it's not as, maybe not as, to many people's eye,
not as as friendly.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Cuddly.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
Maybe not as cuddly, though. Listeners who keep snakes, you
will say, no, this particular snake is cuddly. And you
have a strong case to make there as well.
Speaker 4 (48:42):
I want to hear from listeners who have cats and snakes.
Which one is cuddlier?
Speaker 3 (48:48):
Well, wait a minute. Hold on.
Speaker 4 (48:49):
There's a mystery here. So that explains why the cats
of Cyprus would be called St. Helen's cats or St.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
Helena cats. But wasn't there another name for them? St.
Nicholas cats or something?
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Right. And you might be thinking, well, this couldn't possibly
be Santa Claus, right? But you'd apparently be wrong, because
as far as I can tell, this is supposed to
be the St. Nicholas who then went on to Mira
and through the accumulation of legend and holiday tradition becomes
the figure of Santa Claus. According to the aforementioned sources,
(49:23):
as well as the Virginia Theological Seminary St. Nicholas Center,
this was supposedly where the future St. Nicholas was at
the time. He was there at this monastery, potentially ringing
the bell for the cats to come and eat the snakes.
Speaker 3 (49:39):
Whoa. Yet another crazy St. Nicholas story.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
Do you know the one about how he resurrected the
three boys who had been chopped up and pickled and
cooked in a pot or something?
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Ooh, I'd forgotten about it. But yeah, I think that
does ring a bell. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the legends of St.
Nicholas get pretty fascinating.
Speaker 3 (50:03):
Gets you in the Christmas spirit.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
So the monastery here, the monastery of, the Holy Monastery
of St. Nicholas of the Cats is still around. It
became known for taking in stray cats. The local fishermen would,
for a while, reportedly donate their entire catch to the
cats on the feast day of St.
Speaker 3 (50:23):
Nicholas.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
And, you know, a lot has happened of over the
course of its existence, but apparently it's still around today
as an active monastery and an active cat sanctuary. You
see people visiting it and taking photos, and there indeed
are a lot of cats. Arguably, maybe too many cats,
but this is a place where they're allowed to do
(50:45):
their thing.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
Nonsense. It's beautiful. Cat heaven monastery.
Speaker 1 (50:50):
So Cyprus. So if you are a cat fancier and
you're trying to plan your next cat-based vacation, maybe Cyprus
is your destination.
Speaker 4 (50:58):
By the way, I looked up the Cypress cat breed.
In my opinion, certified cute.
Speaker 1 (51:04):
Well, which cats are not cute, really?
Speaker 3 (51:06):
I guess that's true.
Speaker 1 (51:07):
I mean, I know we'll get some answers from some
of my listeners out there, but it's all subjective.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
It's got fur. It's got big ears. What more could
you want?
Speaker 4 (51:18):
Well, Rob, should we wrap this up before the King
of Cats comes a-knockin'?
Speaker 1 (51:21):
Yes, I think we should. This will be the end
of our second core episode of Stuff to Blow Your
Mind here for Cat Week. But we have one more episode.
Weird House Cinema tomorrow will also be cat based. And,
you know, I didn't expect it to be this way,
but I feel like the movie we're going to be
talking about really lines up with a lot of the
(51:41):
actual serious cat information we've been discussing in the core
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I think the
king of cats would approve.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
OK.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
So tune in for that if you're interested. It is
a title that has also been suggested over the years
by Weird House Cinema listeners. You are invited.
Speaker 3 (51:59):
Tune in if you don't want your Hassan to rip
you to shreds. Exactly. All right.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. If you want to follow us online
at We're on several of the main social media platforms.
Whichever one you use, look us up. You'll probably find
us there. You can follow Weird House Cinema on Letterboxd.
(52:26):
We are weirdhouse there. And on Instagram, our newer Instagram
account is sdbympodcast. We had an older one, had more followers.
It met a tragic end. But we have the newer one,
which we actually can log into. And so if you
do still use the Instagrams and you wish to follow us,
(52:47):
do so. It's another way you can keep up with
what sort of content we're covering and what kind of
content we're planning to cover in the future.
Speaker 3 (52:54):
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway.
Speaker 4 (52:58):
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple
Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 4 (53:31):
Thank you.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is
Robert Lamb. Today is Saturday, so we have another rerun
for you here today. This is an episode that originally
published 8-7-2025. It is Cats of Cyprus. In this episode,
we discuss the oldest known evidence of domesticated cats on
the Isle of Cyprus, as well as tales of St.
Nicholas of the Cats, also associated with the island. All right,
(00:29):
let's do it.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
And I am Joe McCormick.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
And we're continuing Cat Week here on Stuff to Blow
Your Mind. If you are not aware, it is Cat Week,
a celebration of cats in our own weird stuff to
blow your mind, and eventually Weird House Cinema Manor. In
this episode, we're going to be talking about, to a
large extent, the domestication of cats. And when we think
(01:09):
about the oldest human civilizations to value the domestic cat,
I think a lot of us tend to, in many ways,
rightfully think about the ancient Egyptians. After all, the ancient
Egyptians held the cat in high esteem, living with them,
depicting them in their art, casting gods in their likeness.
and of course, sometimes mummifying their remains. So you'd be
(01:31):
quite excused, I think, if you came into this episode
assuming that ancient Egypt provided us with the earliest evidence
of domesticated cats. And in fact, up until, I mean,
reasonably recently, like the early 2000s, but certainly recent enough
that it occurred on the the other end of a
lot of our schooling, this was exactly what was assumed
(01:55):
based on evidence from something like 3,600 years ago concerning
the domestication of the Near Eastern and Egyptian populations of
the African wildcat. But then in the early 2000s, as
we'll be discussing, new archaeological findings pointed researchers to a
new possible location for the oldest known evidence of domesticated cats,
(02:16):
and that is on the Isle of Cyprus. For those
of you who trying to pull up the map in
your own head, or perhaps, you know, opening another window
on whatever device you're at, maybe I'll save you a
trip and a little brain power. The Mediterranean island of
Cyprus is the third largest Mediterranean island after Sicily and Sardinia.
And it was first settled by hunter-gatherers approximately 13,000 years ago.
(02:40):
And it's been uniquely situated over the millennia to experience
cultural exchange with Europe, Africa, and Asia, shaping the Cypriot culture.
And so, as we'll discuss, it's possible that evidence of
domesticated cats does indeed go back some 9,500 years. And,
of course, then some, maybe, to ancient humans in Cyprus.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (03:03):
But before we get to the archaeological evidence for cats
as human companions on the island of Cyprus, I thought
we should briefly look at the question, how did cats
become domesticated? Where does the cat come from? So my
main source here is a paper by Otoni et al.,
Claudio Otoni and co-authors, published in the journal Nature, Ecology,
(03:26):
and Evolution in 2017, and it's called The Paleogenetics of
Cat Dispersal in the Ancient World. The top line here,
is the discovery, and this wasn't always known, because there
are a number of different wildcat subvarieties you find around
the world. There's a European wildcat, there is a Central
(03:47):
Asian wildcat, different wildcats you find all over the place.
And so it was not always known where the domesticated
cat came from. But now researchers can say with a
pretty high degree of confidence that all domesticated cats were
are thought to descend from an original population of wild
cats native to North Africa and Southwest Asia known as
(04:12):
Felis sylvestris libica or the African wild cat. So the
cats that are domestic cats around the world originally come
from the subgroup of the African wild cats. And there
appear to have been two waves of domestication. So the
authors of this paper, Atoni et al., they studied cat
(04:32):
DNA collected from all around the globe. And they determined
through genetic analysis that cat domestication started first in the
Fertile Crescent. That's the earliest time in the Neolithic period.
That's the last part of the Stone Age. And then
it accelerated in Egypt in the first millennium BCE.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
So we can still basically look at our household cats
and think of them as being descendants of the goddess Bastet.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Right, or bast.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
So there's a lot of Egyptian heritage to the domestic
cat species.
Speaker 4 (05:05):
It does seem like ancient Egyptian civilization does contribute hugely
to the domestic cats of today, but ancient Egypt was
not the first time cats were domesticated. That seems to
be in the Fertile Crescent a little bit earlier in
the Neolithic period.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
But maybe the last time they would be domesticated, because
it seems like we're done. It seems like we're at
a good level with the current domestication of the common
house cat.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
I think they're here to stay.
Speaker 4 (05:31):
But speaking of the idea that a domestication attempt of
an animal could not stick around, I was reading about
an interesting variation in a paper by an author that
we'll come back to several times in this episode. A
paper by Jean-Denis Vignier and a bunch of co-authors from
PLOS One in 2016 called Earliest Domestic Cats in China
(05:57):
Identified as Leopard Cat. So in this paper, the authors
agree that all domestic cats today are descended from the
African wildcat. So it's not a dispute about like the
leopard cat being a part of the genetic heritage of,
you know, any cat that you would find in a
house today. Instead, this paper documents archaeological remains from China
(06:22):
dating from between 5500 to 4900 years before present. showing
what appear to be domesticated cats buried in human contexts,
so found in human storage areas or dwellings. And analysis
of the bones of these animals shows that these are
not African wildcats, but rather from a historically short-lived attempt
(06:48):
to domesticate the Asian leopard cat, now an extant wild animal.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
Wow, that is fascinating. Yeah, I mean, you think about
We tend to think about the domestication success stories. And
with the cat, I think we're still figuring out how
successful that was. I know I had my own household
cat just pee all over the place this morning. So
it definitely gave me some time for a few sidebars
(07:17):
as I was finishing the research for this episode. It's like,
have we... Have we reached a good point with this domestication?
I'm not sure. But clearly there are cases where there's
even less of a match and where not enough lines
up in short enough time for the domestication to really
take hold.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Well, yeah.
Speaker 4 (07:35):
I mean, I guess you're sort of asking this question now,
but yeah, it raises the question, like, what counts as domesticated? Like,
how sticky does the relationship have to be between the
humans and these animals for it to really be domesticated? Because, yeah,
in the case of these semi-domesticated or proto-domesticated leopard cats,
the practice appears to have died out. There's not like
(07:56):
a widespread, you know, population of domesticated leopard cat descendants.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
Yeah, I imagine there are a number of different elements
like the cultural attachment, religious significance. And then just, is
it useful? Like, are they serving a purpose in the
household or on, you know, or on the land surrounding
the household? Are they killing the enemies of man and
so forth?
Speaker 4 (08:19):
I have to wonder, I don't have direct evidence of this,
but I have to wonder if the spread of the
domesticated African wildcat descendant could have possibly replaced, you know,
previous attempts to domesticate cats or cat-like animals.
Speaker 1 (08:33):
That's a good point. Yeah, because if you're kind of
like putting in a lot of work to try and
domesticate these leopards and then someone shows up with something
maybe a little more closely aligned to what we think
of as a modern house cat, yeah, you might be
inclined to think, well, heck, let's just go with this.
This model seems to work.
Speaker 4 (08:59):
So how did domestic cats come to cover the entire globe?
Since the African wildcat is native to North Africa and
the Middle East, how did it spread all over the world?
Atoni et al. determined by looking at DNA from cat remains,
especially in major ancient port cities. that domestic cats spread
(09:19):
around the world on ships. It had to have been
by sea travel that they made it from place to
place and eventually basically to the whole world. And they argued,
I think this makes a lot of sense, that they
were probably kept aboard ships to kill rats and mice
that would otherwise get into food stashes during transport. And
this will be a theme, actually. You know, it's funny
(09:42):
how A lot of people listening probably today do not
think of the cat as a functional or working animal.
Speaker 3 (09:49):
It's a companion animal.
Speaker 4 (09:50):
You have a cat to be friends with it, to
feel nice when you're petting it and taking care of it,
to feel good just you know, getting that reciprocal relationship
of companionship and mutual enjoyment with another creature. But for
much of history, the cat had a job to do.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Absolutely. And, you know, I don't know, I still think
about this. I think of my cat primarily as a
companion animal. But You know, there are times where, you know,
I live near some railroad tracks. There's always, there are
rodents out there. And so it does cross my mind
from time to time that she is also kind of
like the last line of defense. That if rodents enter
(10:31):
the house, it's her job to take care of it.
And if not, I will satirize her with poetry so hard. Well,
you better be careful you don't summon the king of cats. Well, yeah,
we're not going to drag him into this. I'm going
to just target Mochi, my cat, with that.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Oh, right.
Speaker 4 (10:49):
I forgot what Sean Chan did. Did he not satirize
cats hard enough to invite the king of cats just
to protect them? Did he actually have to satirize the
king of cats himself?
Speaker 1 (11:00):
He went straight to the king of cats. Cats are
under his jurisdiction, and cats have failed me in not
eating the mice that ate this egg that I was
going to eat.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Yeah, yeah. Okay. He went straight to the top. Run
in his mouth about the boss. That's a bad idea.
Speaker 4 (11:16):
Oh, but this all brings us back to the connection
between cats and the island of Cyprus in the Mediterranean.
Because as you were alluding to earlier, Rob, it seems
that our earliest archaeological evidence of cat-human companionship may be
in an ancient Stone Age grave on the island of Cyprus.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
And so we're going to We're going to skip over
Egyptian cats here and mostly focus on Cyprus. But I
do want to note that we could easily come back
in another episode, maybe next Cat Week, maybe sooner, and
discuss the ancient Egyptians and their cats. But again, this
was an important find. This really changed the way we
understood humanity's relationships. with domesticated or nearly domesticated felines. And again,
(12:04):
this is the work of French scientist Jean-Denis Vignier of
the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, along
with his co-authors. The big initial paper was Early Taming
of the Cat in Cyprus, published in 2004 in the
journal Science. And it essentially set the clock back, I believe,
like a good 5,000 years on what we've understood about
(12:28):
humanity's relationship with the domesticated cat. So this is essentially
how it went down. And Joe, we were both looking
at the same sources here, so jump in if you
want to expand on anything that I'm mentioning here. But essentially,
the researchers discovered a mostly complete skeleton. And I want
to add the caveat that it seems to have been
(12:50):
buried in complete form. It's just parts of the skeleton
were damaged at some point or another.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
And the fact that it's in complete form is important
for reasons we'll get into in a minute.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Exactly, yes. So, mostly complete skeleton of an eight-month-old cat
next to the 9,500-year-old grave of a human being. And
this grave was located in the Chalurukambas archaeological site. This
is a pre-pottery Neolithic bee site. I'm to understand this
(13:21):
was a settlement occupied from the end of the 9th
till the end of the 8th millennium BCE. And this
is in southern Cyprus, a site that had been first
excavated just a decade earlier. And this would have been
one of the Neolithic people that had traveled from the mainland,
bringing knowledge. crops and livestock to Cyprus. Not individually, one
(13:42):
of the people. I mean, more broadly, like the people,
the strain of humanity that came to the island. Right.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
So sometime previous, in the previous few thousand years, there
had been settlers from the mainland, originally occupants of somewhere
in the Fertile Crescent, who were Stone Age humans that
got in boats and made their way to the island.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
Yeah, yeah. So This particular human that was buried, again,
alongside this cat, was apparently about 30 when they died.
And they were buried with various items, which is always
interesting to see what kind of items they were buried with,
or at least the ones we know about because they've
survived in one.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Form or another.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
And it consisted of a marine shell, a stone pendant,
a flint scraper, two small polished axes, and I think
one of those was damaged, a pumice stone, a fragment
of ochre, a large flint-piercing tool, and then several flint blades.
So a lot of, you know, utilitarian tools on their body.
They'd probably been buried in a bag, placed in a
(14:45):
circular pit that also contained various additional shells and stones.
The cat's grave was oval-shaped and about 15 centimeters deep.
The body was seemingly, again, complete at burial, though parts
of it were destroyed, I believe, by plowing, because it
was like the uppermost bones that had been damaged here.
And the cat was laid out on its side, head
(15:07):
to the west and back to the south. That happens
to be the exact same positioning as the human buried
beside it. The cause of death for the feline could
not be determined, but evidence suggested that it had not
been cut, had not been burned. Its body had not
been opened up. Gender of the cat was unknown due
to missing or destroyed pelvic bone pieces.
Speaker 4 (15:28):
So we don't know if the cat died of natural
causes or was killed, but the evidence of its death
was not clear.
Speaker 3 (15:35):
Right.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
It's entirely possible that it could have been killed as
a sacrifice and buried alongside the human. But there's no
evidence that that happened. There's no evidence that that didn't happen. And,
you know, it's not like either possibility really alters the
argument for this animal being important to the person it's
buried with. I mean, either way. It has a privileged
(15:59):
position alongside the human or vice versa. The human has
a privileged position alongside the cat. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
Well, and the the really important thing here being that
it's clear to the archaeologists that this cat was intentionally
buried on purpose. This is it's not a situation where like, oh,
a cat was running around and it just happened to
die near the grave and they're mistaking it for me.
And there were several reasons for thinking. that this is
an intentional burial alongside the human, not just the proximity,
(16:27):
it is right beside the other grave, but also you
mentioned the fact that the cat's skeleton was articulated, meaning
like the joints were still connected and intact, basically.
Speaker 3 (16:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
And Meunier also points out that the mere fact that
it was buried like this, articulated, almost entirely intact, if
not entirely intact, means it was likely a tame species.
Because when wild animals were rarely buried during this time,
the skeletons were generally rather incomplete. So just everything about
(16:59):
the way this creature has been buried and the way
it's positioned and so forth, it seems to indicate that
this animal was likely domesticated to some degree. And we
should also note that these findings, Vignier backs up by
pointing to various other cat remains found, at least in
pieces elsewhere on the island. And, uh, and also the idea,
(17:20):
he mentions the idea that cats had special status, um,
among these individuals was also, is also backed up by
the discovery of figurines in neighboring regions from this time,
as well as a one that was found at the
same archeological site in Cyprus though, from a slightly earlier time.
So everything seems in place here to suggest, yeah, a
tame cat, a cat that is, that is considered close
(17:43):
to humans for one reason or another. We'll get into
more about, you know, some of those reasons. and also
by a culture that values the cat enough to create
its likeness. Again, maybe for religious purposes, maybe for some
other purpose, but they certainly held the cat in high esteem.
Speaker 4 (18:05):
Now, another thing that would be interesting to know is,
do we know what kind of cat this was?
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Yes, yeah. So, Vignier contends that the, quote, the post-cranial
and cranial measurements fall in the upper half of the
range variation of size of the Western Asian Felis sylvestris libica.
So this does seem to be the African wildcat. And
I'm only just now realizing that the cartoon cat Sylvester
(18:32):
gets its name probably from this.
Speaker 4 (18:35):
Well, I think the name Sylvester means like from the
forest or of the woods, though I assume that's what
it means in the context of this cat's name as well.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
The cartoon cat?
Speaker 4 (18:45):
Well, the real species and the cartoon I don't know
about the cartoon cat. That probably just, yeah, maybe that
comes from this.
Speaker 1 (18:51):
But anyway, this does seem to be the African wild cat. Uh,
so the ancestor of the domestic cat, um, though this
would of course have been the earlier domestication wave, not the,
the one that really took hold. Uh, and this specimen
was apparently bigger than a modern domestic cat, uh, had
longer limbs. Um, but it is definitely, uh, uh, an
(19:13):
African wild cat. Uh, points out that there's no evidence
of a native field species of cat on Cyprus. So
they would have had to have been introduced by these
Neolithic settlers. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
And I'll have more on that in just a minute.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
So this updated timeline would put the domestication just 3,000
years after the likely domestication point of the dog and
alongside the human domestication of the sheep, mastery of wheat
as well. So I think settlers of Catan fans out
there will recognize that this is just one stone short
of getting to buy a development car. So this is
a big deal when it comes to the advancement of
(19:48):
your civilization.
Speaker 4 (19:49):
But does it help you with the longest road?
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Nope.
Speaker 1 (19:53):
You're going to need, what, bricks and wood for that.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
Now, just a note about the timeline of dog domestication,
because I think reading about the timeline of dog domestication
can be confusing sometimes because While the earliest undisputed archaeological
evidence of a dog buried with humans comes from the
15th millennium before present, so that's from a site in
(20:17):
modern Germany, genetic evidence shows that modern domestic dogs began
to diverge from their wolf ancestors something like 20,000 to
40,000 years ago. I think there are some different figures
on that, but that's a commonly cited range. So genetic
evidence shows the process beginning much earlier, but the genetic
(20:38):
evidence doesn't tell us exactly how domesticated those proto-dogs or
divergent wolves were in terms of behavior and living arrangements.
So for example, it could be that for thousands of years,
these proto-dogs were only partially domesticated, not necessarily treated as companions,
but genetically and behaviorally adapted to increased.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
Interaction with human populations.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
One example of this would be following humans around and
scavenging their camps. So yeah, the truth is we don't
know exactly when people started treating dogs like pets or
like working animals, but the first clear archaeological evidence for
that kind of relationship comes from the 15th millennium B.C.
And again, like with the cat example, that's from an
(21:26):
example of humans being buried along with their dog. I
think it's from a couple being buried with their dog.
Speaker 1 (21:32):
It's also confusing because sometimes we use BP in measuring
this because we're saying before Pluto, before Pluto, the Disney
cartoon dog. So it's essentially the same, but it's off by.
Speaker 3 (21:44):
A few decades.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
So apart from the proximity to a human grave, One
clue that the cat skeleton found at Shiluro Kambos might
have been a domesticated cat begins with the observation that,
as you said a minute ago, Rob, the African wildcat
was not native to Cyprus before the arrival of humans.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
That's worth stressing.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
There were no wildcats on Cyprus at all. And we
know that pretty conclusively from the fossil record.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
No cats. In fact.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
The fossil record indicates that before humans, there were very
few terrestrial mammals at all on Cyprus. This is probably
because even during glacial maximum periods, when the sea levels
were at their lowest, Cyprus was never connected to the mainland.
So the only pre-human terrestrial mammals on Cyprus appear to
(22:41):
have been the following. One was The dwarf hippopotamus, this
seems to have gone extinct when humans arrived, which was
about 12,500 years before present. So they were very likely
hunted or otherwise driven extinct by humans. The dwarf elephant
also disappeared when we showed up. The Cypriot genet, which
(23:01):
is a small carnivore, sort of a cat-like, weasel-like creature,
a little.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
Bit raccoony maybe. It's got a long tail.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
May have survived a few thousand years after humans arrived,
but it is now extinct. And then finally, the Cypriot mouse,
which is the only native land mammal from.
Speaker 3 (23:20):
Cyprus that still exists today.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
And, you know, that's quite a compliment for the Cypriot
mouse to have survived, given what is about to follow.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
Well, mice are hardy, but yeah, when humans show up
on an island, we do a lot of damage, especially
us and the things we bring with us.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Oh, do you think humans are the reason that the
hippopotamus and the elephant disappeared? It's just a coincidence, I assume, right?
Speaker 4 (23:43):
So since cats were not native to the island and
thus not acquired locally, we know that ancient humans, and
these would have been Stone Age farmers originally from the
Fertile Crescent, must have crossed the sea with cats in
their boats. And given the size of the boats that
would have been used, and given the fact that you
(24:04):
need multiple breeding pairs to establish a stable island population,
it's just not very plausible that we could be dealing
with the case of cat stowaways that establish themselves on
an island. That's not, I don't know, it's not impossible,
but it seems very unlikely.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Especially because, you know, to be clear, over the course
of time, unlikely introductions do occur. We see that, especially
when you go beyond the span of human civilizations and
you look at just like, you know, more like geologic time.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
But this is not millions of years, right? This is
not millions of years.
Speaker 1 (24:44):
This is within the range of human domain. And it
suspiciously involves an animal that humans took a liking to.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
So it seems much more likely that humans brought cats
to Cyprus across the sea on purpose.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
But why? Well, one clue is that cats.
Speaker 4 (25:03):
Were not the only non-native animal species introduced by humans.
So here I want to reference another paper, again, where
Jean Denis Vignier is the first author. This one is
called Historical Dynamics of the Human-Environment Interactions in Cyprus During
the 12th to 10th Millennium Before or Present, the Last
(25:23):
30 Years of Contributions of the Amathus Area. This was
published in the Journal of Archaeological Science Reports in the
year 2023, once again.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
By Vignet et al.
Speaker 4 (25:36):
So in this paper, the authors are actually looking at
a lot of different stuff. They're tracking what we know
about how the physical environment of Cyprus changed before, during,
and after its early colonization by humans. And they look at, quote,
(26:03):
birth and evolution of the commensal fauna, e.g. mice, cats,
and crows. And commensal fauna means things living alongside. Commensalism
in biology is typically, it's a type of symbiotic relationship
in which one organism gets a benefit and the other
is not really affected one way or another. And then
(26:24):
the list goes on. Local domestication of wild boar and goats,
adaptation and intensification of cultivation and breeding to the local environments.
So to zoom in specifically on the introduction of new
animal species, the authors write that the first introduction we
have evidence of is actually the wild boar, which was
(26:45):
established on the island during the Epipaleolithic, probably as hunting stock.
So the boar remains found on Cyprus show insular dwarfism,
meaning that they're about 15% smaller than the mainland variety.
And they were often wounded with arrowheads. So this would
be an interesting early case of intentional animal management or
(27:10):
game management. Bringing a live stock of a wild species
to an island to release so that it can establish
itself there and so you can hunt it on the island.
Speaker 1 (27:23):
Yeah, yeah. This is fascinating to think about because I
know for my own part, I often think about this
more when I'm thinking about.
Europeans, you know, setting off during the Age of Discovery
and as well as the expansion, you know, of Polynesia
(27:43):
and Micronesia and so forth, seafaring folks coming to an
island and realizing, hey, nice island here, but there's nothing
to eat here. I better leave some pigs. I better
leave some goats. And then I can come back and
this island will be my larder. But, you know, clearly
this has been in the human playbook for a very
long time.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Right.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
I mean, this is like thousands of years before I
imagined there was such a practice.
Speaker 1 (28:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (28:07):
So seeding, yes, seeding an island with a new game
species that can be hunted for generations to come. But
then well after the introduction of the boar during the
11th millennium before present, we get other mammals appearing. And
this includes domestic dogs brought from the Levant, the Western
European house mouse. And cats, this would be the African wildcat,
(28:29):
as we've been talking about. Now to clarify, there is
no evidence that the wildcats brought along were initially treated
as companions or had any special significance to humans. That
evidence would start to appear more than a thousand years
later with that human-cat co-burial. So why were cats brought?
(28:51):
The authors here argue that it was likely that African
wildcats were brought to Cyprus in as an already semi-domesticated
commensal species that were valued for pest control. Because if
you are a farming society and you take foods, you
take grain or other food somewhere with you, it is
(29:11):
pretty much a guarantee that rodents are sneaking along for
the ride or that there are already rodents where you're going.
And either way, they're going to get into your food.
Rodent attacks on human food caches are just a perennial
problem for human cultures going back as far as we
have evidence. So if these cute, moody, little carnivorous critters,
(29:33):
these cats, already like to hang out around your villages
and kill the mice, it is definitely worth bringing some
of them along with you when you move to a
new place across the sea. So these early cats were
probably intentionally brought to Cyprus for the purpose of pest control.
And then after this, well, around the same time, maybe
(29:55):
a few hundred years later, we start to see some
other things, goats and cattle being Goats seem to have
been treated not as domestic animals initially, but as wild
game stocks. So kind of like the boars like hunted
for some time, uh, wild on the Island before they
were either domesticated or re domesticated on the Island. They may,
they may have been domesticated earlier on the mainland and
(30:15):
then released wild on the Island. Um, but eventually they
get re domesticated or domesticated for the first time. Then
after this, we start to see more introductions. You get, um,
Fallow deer, again, brought and established as a wild population
and then hunted domestic sheep. And then, curiously, I thought
this was so interesting, foxes.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Foxes. Foxes.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
Not native to the island of Cyprus. They were not
there on their own. They had to have been brought
by humans. It is hard to imagine foxes could establish
themselves by accident, like just stowing away in boats, right?
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Again, you need... You need.
Speaker 4 (30:54):
Multiple breeding pairs to have a stable population there. How
would you get enough foxes to the island? It's harder
for foxes to steal away than it is for mice,
I think.
Speaker 1 (31:06):
And why bring them? Like, I don't know, this seems
along the lines of, say, intentionally introducing raccoons to the side.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
To get into your trash cans.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
Yeah, like, I mean, and I imagine folks living with
urban foxes probably see that as a more direct comparison. Yeah,
but like, why bring the foxes?
Speaker 4 (31:25):
The authors say we don't know. We don't know why
they brought the foxes. Maybe this is just a guess.
So there's not a reason to think this. You're just
having to guess. Maybe foxes had some kind of cultural
or religious significance to the settlers, possibly. The physical evidence
indicates that foxes were not hunted and they were tolerated
as commensals in the early Cypriot villages. The authors say, quote,
(31:49):
this also strengthens the idea that early Neolithic people were
experimenting with with a lot of different systems of relationships
with animals. So just try it out.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
Why not?
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Yeah, I mean, if you think about the idea of
bringing cats with you, and these cats are not necessarily
your friends, they just live in the same area, and
they eat something, they kill something that is useful to
you that they're killing them.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Enemy of my enemy, yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Yeah, so maybe something similar with foxes. They're like, we
have seen the foxes eat mice or something that we
don't want around. They seem to have a meaningful purpose,
so let's just bring them along.
Speaker 4 (32:29):
Yeah, I wonder, yeah, could foxes have possibly been thought
of as pest control? I don't know how plausible that is.
Somebody who has more experience with foxes, please write in
about that. Is that plausible that they were a complementary
pest control system, possibly? Once again, I want to make clear,
the authors don't say that.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
We don't know.
Speaker 1 (32:47):
Yeah, and it seems to me, anyway, that it, like,
The discovery that any of these introductions could backfire on
us is a pretty recent revelation for human beings. So
maybe I'm wrong. Maybe earlier civilizations did realize that they
could blow it, introducing animals intentionally for one purpose, and
(33:08):
then it just doesn't work out. But either way, they
had to have some reason to bring them there. And
it's fascinating to try and guess what that could have been.
They just like the look of them, maybe.
Speaker 3 (33:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:20):
Well, I would not dismiss the idea of people simply
liking the look of cats in the gradual evolution of
the cat from a working animal, you know, a commensal
tolerated because of their pest control capabilities into becoming a
companion animal that you would want to have sit in
your lap and pet and feed and have buried alongside you.
Speaker 1 (33:39):
Yeah, yeah. And I imagine another thing you could factor
in is, as always, how cute do the pups look?
How cute do the kittens look?
Speaker 3 (33:47):
And so forth.
Speaker 1 (33:48):
I mean, that has been a major factor with dogs
and cats and various other animals. If they kind of
look like human babies, if they get that cute response
out of us, then that has a benefit to us,
but it also really benefits the animal that we're inevitably
trying to domesticate.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
That's true.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Baby foxes are quite cute, I imagine. I'm not summoning
an image to my mind right off the bat, but
I'm just going to assume they're very cute to look at.
So maybe that's part of it.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
But how this relationship evolved on Stone Age Cyprus, we
don't know.
Speaker 3 (34:24):
We can only speculate.
Speaker 4 (34:35):
But, Rob, you had some other stuff on Cats in
Cyprus from more recent history, right?
Speaker 3 (34:41):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
There are are still domesticated cats on the Isle of Cyprus,
which should not come as a surprise to anyone because
domesticated cats are everywhere now.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
They're hard to shake loose.
Speaker 1 (34:52):
Yeah, yeah. Again, they're here to stay. I think this
is the last domestication of the African wildcat. And there's
apparently no known connection between all the cats you'll find
there on Cyprus today and the so-called ancient Cypriot wildcat
this initial wave of domestication that we see in the
(35:13):
archaeological record there. But the Cypress cat is a designated
domestic cat breed found on the island. Again, just a
breed of domestic cat, sometimes called the St. Helen cat
and sometimes called the St. Nicholas cat.
Speaker 4 (35:30):
So if you hear those two things, they're the same animal.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (35:34):
But I want to walk through the saintly connections here.
And in this, we're going to be dealing more with
a lot of legends and some fact, but certainly less science.
So let's discuss this St. Helen connection first. This refers
to Helena of Constantinople, who would have lived 246 or
(35:56):
248 through 330 CE, mother of Constantine I. And she does, again,
an actual historic person here. who does, it does seem
like she may have spent some time in Cyprus, as
it was under her patronage. And the legend here is
that she imported hundreds of cats from Egypt or Persia
(36:20):
or Palestine. The exacts on this seem to vary. I've
seen various sources that point to different places. But somewhere
that had cats, she, according to this legend, shipped them in,
like a thousand or so. And this would have been
in the 4th century CE. And the purpose of was
to rid the monastery there, which she founded, of snakes.
Speaker 4 (36:44):
There are a lot of legends about the travels and
pilgrimages of St.
Speaker 3 (36:49):
Helen.
Speaker 4 (36:49):
I know it said also that didn't she make a
journey to find the true cross?
Speaker 3 (36:54):
Well, there was a lot of that going on. Yes.
She was at least one of the people who found
the true cross. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
So take all of these legends with at least a
grain of salt, you know, especially when we're dealing with
saints from this era, like This is where you can
potentially run into the problem of, like, this person has,
there are too many relics out there. There are more
relics than she had bones. Not specifically in this case,
but that sort of thing can sometimes occur. There's a
(37:20):
lot of legends that build up around these individuals, even
though at the core we're dealing with an actual human
being who existed. So, snakes. Yes, Cyprus is home to
numerous snake species, venomous and non-venomous. There's one that's actually
called the cat snake. And there's a there's one called
the Cyprus whip snake. And this one is endemic to Cyprus.
(37:44):
But this is the legend that the the monastery had
a snake problem. And so St. Helena brings in a
bunch of cats or has cats brought in, according to
the slate.
Speaker 4 (37:57):
I was just picturing her trying to bring them all herself.
Speaker 3 (37:59):
Oh, God, yes.
Speaker 1 (38:00):
I mean, trying to bring one would be a task.
I don't even want to imagine the effort. It's like
load up the ship with a thousand cats. That's going
to be a pretty gross ship by the time you
get over. But according to the Slade article, the Holy
Monastery of St. Nicholas of the Cats solved a snake
problem with felines. This is by Eric Grundhauser. I also
(38:22):
looked at the website of the author, Charlotte Riggle, charloteriggle.com.
She has some materials on this. And basically, legend has
it that Cyprus was in the midst of an epic
drought at the time. I've seen it, given an account
of like 37 years of drought. And it's just driving
the snakes indoors in search of water. And mainly, it's
(38:44):
running them into the monastery. So they're trying to do
the Lord's work in there, but there are just too
many snakes. Somebody's got to do something about these snakes.
Speaker 4 (38:52):
Sounds like the sub to a... I don't know, ancient
snakes on a plane prequel? Snakes in a monastery?
Speaker 1 (38:58):
Essentially, the legend makes it sound like that level of infestation.
Like it's just completely out of control and it's driving
people off the island. Like people are leaving Cyprus because
there are just too many snakes.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
Popping out of the holy water basin. Yeah. Dangling from
the ceiling.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Yeah, so this led me to... to wonder a little bit, like,
is this at all reasonable? Like, is this just purely legendary?
Is it possible that snakes would get this out of control?
I mean, one potentially, one way to think about this
is that we should mention that this is not the
only tidbit from the ancient world about snake infestations getting
(39:36):
out of control or particular problem snakes interfering with the
machinations of various rulers. There are various accounts of plagues
of serpents, of course, descriptions of foreign lands and enemy
battlefields that are infested with snakes and other undesired creatures.
And of course, a lot of that you can think
(39:57):
about from various angles, like how do you want to
insult the land of foreigners? You can just say, oh,
it's just nothing but snakes and scorpions everywhere.
Speaker 3 (40:07):
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
Yeah, a lot of these, they just sound like obvious exaggeration.
Though then again, I don't want to say it provides
any evidence that this particular story is true, but we
have talked on the show before about great gatherings of snakes,
like at the, uh, the Narcissus, uh, how do we
pronounce it? The Narcissa or Narcissus snake dens in Canada.
Speaker 3 (40:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (40:30):
Once again, to be clear, I'm not saying like, oh,
that's what's happening here. And therefore the story is true,
but snakes can gather in massive numbers.
Speaker 1 (40:38):
I mean, anyone who's ever been around snakes, you know
that yes, snakes do enter into human areas, right? And
when they do, given the place that snakes hold in
our minds, you know, the threat that snakes can pose
to us, the fact that we are often frightened by snakes,
(40:59):
and also all of the layers of meaning that we
attribute to snakes, all of this makes it meaningful when
a snake is where we don't think a snake should be.
Speaker 3 (41:07):
Yeah. Yeah. This is magic. This is a curse.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:13):
I was looking around for other examples. It honestly gets
a little confusing at times looking for even legendary histories
that are referring to snake infestations. One reason I found
is that there are certain works of Mormon apologetics out
there that talk about some of this. There is apparently
(41:36):
an incident in the Book of Mormon that involves a
serpent infestation, and so Some, at least some of these
works of apologetics, like attempt to back this up with
other examples from ancient history. As with any work of apologetics,
we often have to take that with a grain of
salt because obviously, you know, it's an attempt to back
up certain ideas with an interpretation of reality.
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:58):
Religious apologetics being one of the most straightforward forms of
motivated reasoning.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:03):
But not without value as literature.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
I mean, it can still point you to these real examples,
but it doesn't necessarily prove that you know, the story
they're using it as evidence for.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Now, this one doesn't involve a bunch of snakes. It
just involves one giant snake. But it involves the adventures
of Roman General Marcus Attilius Regulus during the First Punic War.
His troops are said to have encountered a giant snake,
and it just became like a whole battle, like essentially
(42:33):
a kaiju battle.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Wait, where are you saying? On Cyprus?
Speaker 1 (42:37):
No, no, this is elsewhere in the ancient world.
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Oh, okay, sorry, sorry.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
This was not on Cyprus, but just an example of
a snake showing up in another legend about, again, another
historic individual. Though in this case, it is not mentioned
in the primary histories. For instance, it's not in the
writings of Polybius about the Punic Wars. It's in sort
of secondary sources, and it's thought to just generally be
(43:01):
a legend, a tall tale about how great this guy was.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
I see.
Speaker 1 (43:05):
Now, elsewhere in legends and tall tales about holy places
infested by snakes, there are a couple of stories that
popped up. And I realize, yes, we're getting a little
far away from cats here. But these were too fascinating
to not cover on the show. So from the 7th
century CE, there is the story of St. Hilda's Abbey.
(43:27):
This is in Yorkshire, in Britain. This is also the
area where Count Dracula moves to, in Bram Stoker's Dracula,
by the way.
Speaker 3 (43:35):
Oh, interesting.
Speaker 4 (43:36):
Did I forget about, in the novel, does he not
actually come directly to London? He goes somewhere up in
the north?
Speaker 1 (43:42):
I believe so. Now, I haven't actually read Dracula in
a number of years. I've mostly been watching various cinematic
adaptations that drift pretty far from the source at times.
But there does seem to be a Dracula connection here,
very loosely, but I'm going to mention it. So the
idea here is that St. Hilda's Abbey was infested by
(44:03):
snakes until Hilda of Whitby, Turn them to stone with,
I guess, holy magic. And there's actually a science tie-in
to this legend, though, as it seems to be a
strong case for geomythology here. in order to explain the
presence of fossilized ammonites in the area. Now, you can
(44:23):
look up images of ammonites here if you're not instantly
recognizing them. But once you see them, you go like, oh, yes, that.
I've seen that fossil many times. You know, it essentially
has the look. It does look like something curled up.
It can easily be mistaken for a curled up serpent
or a curled up centipede or something that has been fossilized.
Speaker 4 (44:41):
Yeah, ammonites were cephalopods that lived in the sea that
went extinct, the KPG extinction, along with the non-avian dinosaurs.
But yeah, the fossils will be basically a spiral shell
because they had a spiral shell shape, kind of like
nautiluses today. But from what I understand, they're more closely
related to some other species than the nautiluses, but look
(45:02):
superficially similar. And yeah, and you can still find lots
of fossils of these shells. I remember coming across... ammonite
fossils and reading about the discovery of a lot of
ammonite fossils on the Jurassic Coast in England when I
was there.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (45:16):
So you can imagine folks running across these and thinking,
these look like snakes that have been turned to stone.
And then to add an extra layer here, and kind
of getting back to apologetics to a certain extent, you
have examples where these ammonites have then been carved, a
little serpent's head. or something that's supposed to be a
(45:37):
serpent's head, has been carved at the very end of
the creature to make it look like it is a snake.
And you can look images up of this online as well.
The one I found here I shared with you, Joe,
looks so much like the sandworms from Beetlejuice. But except friendlier.
It doesn't have sharp teeth. It's going, hi, hello. Yeah,
(45:59):
he doesn't look as fearsome. He looks a little duck-like.
Speaker 3 (46:01):
I'm just a little snake.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
Now, there's another legend I ran across. This is the
legend of the monastery of Langovarda in Greece, located on
the island of Cephalonia, in which the snakes are said
to have actually defended the monastery against pirates in, I believe, 1705.
Speaker 3 (46:30):
That's my kind of story. I like that.
Speaker 4 (46:33):
I like a trap for intruders that involves animals, like
a pit, a moat with piranhas in it, a pit
full of snakes, something like that.
Speaker 1 (46:41):
Crab pit?
Speaker 3 (46:42):
Crab pit. That'd be really good.
Speaker 1 (46:45):
Well, in this case, it was snakes protecting nuns that
were living there at the time. And then afterwards, these
snakes find Christ. They become holy snakes. Sometimes said to
have crosses on their heads. And then they show up.
At the monastery, it said in the days leading up
to August 15th, the Feast of the Dormition of the
(47:05):
Virgin Mary. So essentially right now, this place is sometimes
called the Monastery of the Virgin Mary of the Snakes.
You can look up pictures of these snakes, too. I
don't know. I'm not seeing the cross on their foreheads
so much. But, you know, this is more of an
article of faith rather than a matter of herpetology.
Speaker 4 (47:28):
Okay, well, I have really enjoyed this snake hunt, but
does this inform our attempt to answer the question, is
there any historical truth to the idea of St. Helena
bringing a bunch of snakes to the monastery in Cyprus? Sorry,
not snakes, bringing cats to the monastery to get rid
of the snakes.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
I don't know that it actually provides us with additional answers,
but I guess I'll just come back to it. When
you're dealing with snakes, a snake is just such a
loaded creature. We have so many thoughts about the snakes,
so many layers of meaning with the snake. And so
the legends just pile up. But yeah, there are other
accounts of snake infestations being a thing. And, you know,
(48:09):
we do see examples of, there are places in the
world where snakes do become a problem, especially when you're dealing,
I mean, mainly when you're dealing with venomous snakes. Because
a non-venomous snake is essentially going to do as good,
if not more good, than having a cat around. I mean,
it's not as, maybe not as, to many people's eye,
not as as friendly.
Speaker 3 (48:30):
Cuddly.
Speaker 1 (48:31):
Maybe not as cuddly, though. Listeners who keep snakes, you
will say, no, this particular snake is cuddly. And you
have a strong case to make there as well.
Speaker 4 (48:42):
I want to hear from listeners who have cats and snakes.
Which one is cuddlier?
Speaker 3 (48:48):
Well, wait a minute. Hold on.
Speaker 4 (48:49):
There's a mystery here. So that explains why the cats
of Cyprus would be called St. Helen's cats or St.
Speaker 3 (48:57):
Helena cats. But wasn't there another name for them? St.
Nicholas cats or something?
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Right. And you might be thinking, well, this couldn't possibly
be Santa Claus, right? But you'd apparently be wrong, because
as far as I can tell, this is supposed to
be the St. Nicholas who then went on to Mira
and through the accumulation of legend and holiday tradition becomes
the figure of Santa Claus. According to the aforementioned sources,
(49:23):
as well as the Virginia Theological Seminary St. Nicholas Center,
this was supposedly where the future St. Nicholas was at
the time. He was there at this monastery, potentially ringing
the bell for the cats to come and eat the snakes.
Speaker 3 (49:39):
Whoa. Yet another crazy St. Nicholas story.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
Do you know the one about how he resurrected the
three boys who had been chopped up and pickled and
cooked in a pot or something?
Speaker 1 (49:52):
Ooh, I'd forgotten about it. But yeah, I think that
does ring a bell. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the legends of St.
Nicholas get pretty fascinating.
Speaker 3 (50:03):
Gets you in the Christmas spirit.
Speaker 1 (50:06):
So the monastery here, the monastery of, the Holy Monastery
of St. Nicholas of the Cats is still around. It
became known for taking in stray cats. The local fishermen would,
for a while, reportedly donate their entire catch to the
cats on the feast day of St.
Speaker 3 (50:23):
Nicholas.
Speaker 1 (50:24):
And, you know, a lot has happened of over the
course of its existence, but apparently it's still around today
as an active monastery and an active cat sanctuary. You
see people visiting it and taking photos, and there indeed
are a lot of cats. Arguably, maybe too many cats,
but this is a place where they're allowed to do
(50:45):
their thing.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
Nonsense. It's beautiful. Cat heaven monastery.
Speaker 1 (50:50):
So Cyprus. So if you are a cat fancier and
you're trying to plan your next cat-based vacation, maybe Cyprus
is your destination.
Speaker 4 (50:58):
By the way, I looked up the Cypress cat breed.
In my opinion, certified cute.
Speaker 1 (51:04):
Well, which cats are not cute, really?
Speaker 3 (51:06):
I guess that's true.
Speaker 1 (51:07):
I mean, I know we'll get some answers from some
of my listeners out there, but it's all subjective.
Speaker 3 (51:13):
It's got fur. It's got big ears. What more could
you want?
Speaker 4 (51:18):
Well, Rob, should we wrap this up before the King
of Cats comes a-knockin'?
Speaker 1 (51:21):
Yes, I think we should. This will be the end
of our second core episode of Stuff to Blow Your
Mind here for Cat Week. But we have one more episode.
Weird House Cinema tomorrow will also be cat based. And,
you know, I didn't expect it to be this way,
but I feel like the movie we're going to be
talking about really lines up with a lot of the
(51:41):
actual serious cat information we've been discussing in the core
episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I think the
king of cats would approve.
Speaker 2 (51:49):
OK.
Speaker 1 (51:50):
So tune in for that if you're interested. It is
a title that has also been suggested over the years
by Weird House Cinema listeners. You are invited.
Speaker 3 (51:59):
Tune in if you don't want your Hassan to rip
you to shreds. Exactly. All right.
Speaker 1 (52:04):
Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is
primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Fridays, we set aside most
serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on
Weird House Cinema. If you want to follow us online
at We're on several of the main social media platforms.
Whichever one you use, look us up. You'll probably find
us there. You can follow Weird House Cinema on Letterboxd.
(52:26):
We are weirdhouse there. And on Instagram, our newer Instagram
account is sdbympodcast. We had an older one, had more followers.
It met a tragic end. But we have the newer one,
which we actually can log into. And so if you
do still use the Instagrams and you wish to follow us,
(52:47):
do so. It's another way you can keep up with
what sort of content we're covering and what kind of
content we're planning to cover in the future.
Speaker 3 (52:54):
Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway.
Speaker 4 (52:58):
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple
Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 4 (53:31):
Thank you.
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
Betrayal Weekly
Betrayal Weekly is back for a new season. Every Thursday, Betrayal Weekly shares first-hand accounts of broken trust, shocking deceptions, and the trail of destruction they leave behind. Hosted by Andrea Gunning, this weekly ongoing series digs into real-life stories of betrayal and the aftermath. From stories of double lives to dark discoveries, these are cautionary tales and accounts of resilience against all odds. From the producers of the critically acclaimed Betrayal series, Betrayal Weekly drops new episodes every Thursday. If you would like to share your story, you can reach out to the Betrayal Team by emailing them at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod and @glasspodcasts. Please join our Substack for additional exclusive content, curated book recommendations, and community discussions. Sign up FREE by clicking this link Beyond Betrayal Substack. Join our community dedicated to truth, resilience, and healing. Your voice matters! Be a part of our Betrayal journey on Substack.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.