The origin story of domesticated rabbits may be all wrong

 

study published yesterday, they believe scientists have been mixing up Pope Gregory with a completely different person with the same name: Saint Gregory of Tours, a historian who had once alluded to people eating baby rabbits during Lent.

“It’s like a game of telephone,” Larson says. “Somebody said something, and it was embellished or something was left out, and then they told the next person, and so on. And all of the sudden you have this one message that, when compared to the original, said nothing of the sort.”

Larson adds that he thinks this narrative persisted for so long because, “It’s not just that people love stories, it’s a particular kind of story. People love a eureka moment.”

He also cautions that we shouldn’t think of animal domestication as centered around a single event like Pope Gregory’s fictional decree, but think of it instead as a long, continuous process where different traits are selected for along the way—whether intentional or not. For example, maybe it took a few centuries for rabbits to feel comfortable around humans, and another few centuries to breed bigger or smaller rabbits, or rabbits with different colored fur.

Larson hasn’t closed his investigation, either. To better understand the rabbit domestication timeline, Larson wants to take a closer look at other ways the rabbit and humans have intertwined. Figuring out the first time colored rabbits showed up in tapestries or finding the first instance of the word ‘hutch’—small wooden structures used to house rabbits—and then matching it up with the rabbit’s genetic changes, Larson says, could make that record a little more clear.

“Nobody knows what the answers are because nobody thought to ask.”

sumber: https://www.popsci.com/rabbit-domestication-story/