Nuke Miko: Chronicles of America

——It really can be said that "where there are people, there are dogs."

In contrast, the history of domestication of cats by humans is much shorter.

Until around the time of the birth of Jesus, at least 80.00% of humans in the world had either never seen cats at all, or only seen wild cats, but did not know that cats could be kept as pets.

However, although the domestication and dissemination of cats was much later than that of dogs, the subsequent development was full of stamina, and soon won a place in the world to keep pace with dogs in various countries, nations and religions. first-class pet status.

In modern society, cats have made cat ears, cat collars, cat bells and cat tails become the real symbols of "cute" by taking advantage of the trend of "cute culture". , making countless cat slaves obsessed with sucking and pawing cats, and finally achieved the overtake of dogs in one fell swoop: Regarding this, one of the most powerful evidences is-at present, there are about [-] million dogs live with [-] million cats!

——In the competition of competing for living space and winning the favor of human beings, dogs, which have been domesticated by humans for at least 5000 years, are overtaken by cats that have lived with humans for at most 4000 years. What should I say.

Dog: woof woof!Obviously I came first... Whether it is being raised, playing with humans, or acting cute, I am 1 years earlier than you!But why, why are you more popular now, Wang? !

Cat: Meow!Who told others to be cuter than you?Cute is justice, meow!

——It can be seen from this that the extraordinary magic power of the meow star people charms people's hearts.

However, although keeping cats, petting cats, and sucking cats has become popular all over the world, from a historical point of view, cats are an out-and-out alien species in most areas.The Egyptians on the banks of the Nile were the first to domesticate cats as pets.

——The ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids were also the first batch of excrement shovelers and cat slaves in human history.

Because, they are really worshiping cats as gods in terms of ideology and law...

PS: Happy Meow Festival in the Year of the Tiger! ! !

Meow's Story

Just like the ancient early Homo sapiens "walked out of Africa" ​​10 years ago and became the common ancestor of all humans around the world today.Modern domestic cats also came out of Africa more than 2000 years ago, and then gradually conquered cat slaves all over the world.

However, although both humans and domestic cats originated in Africa, wild cats are found throughout the entire Old World, from Scotland to South Africa, from Spain to Mongolia, and there were all kinds of wild cats long before the birth of human civilization.

To give a similar example: Humans in the modern world, no matter which continent they live in, what skin color they have, or which ethnic group they belong to, all belong to the group of Homo sapiens who "went out of Africa" ​​10 years ago. But at the same time, there are ancient ape-man remains that were eliminated by modern Homo sapiens all over the world, such as the "Neanderthals" in Europe, the "Peking Man" in China, and so on.

The difference is that, while the rest of the human lineage is now extinct, undomesticated feral cats are still roaming around.

——According to the biological classification, there are as many as 27 subspecies of cats, and different cat subspecies vary in size, coat color and pattern.Cats from drier areas tend to have paler and lighter coats with more indistinct markings, while cats from humid areas tend to have darker coats with darker spots or bands.

Before the agricultural revolution started and the settlement era came, there was not much intersection between cats and humans.

When the primitive people wrapped in animal skins came out of the cave, carrying spears and leading dogs, looking for prey and wild fruits in the wilderness, for them, the agile wild cats were just a kind of animal that was neither easy to hunt nor had many. Meat, and small animals that are hard to eat.

In the eyes of wild cats at that time, humans holding sharp stone spears were roughly equivalent to a group of "big guys who can't be messed with". I leaned over to act cute.

Until the agricultural revolution and the fire of settled civilization germinated in the Middle East, and humans entered the early days of the farming era, cats did not enter the list of the first batch of domesticated animals, and no one even thought of domesticating cats.

——Because, for the ancient human civilization with underdeveloped productive forces, domestication of any kind of wild animal would require a huge cost. Humans look after their homes and hunt; horses and donkeys have made great contributions to human beings in transportation; cattle help humans plow and cultivate land; sheep can provide human beings with meat, wool and milk...

More importantly, the ancestors of most domesticated animals, such as dogs (wolves), horses, cows, and sheep, originally lived in groups. Groups have obvious class characteristics, and naturally have a thinking mode of obeying the orders of the leader, and are also used to Live with many of the same kind.

Human taming them is equivalent to replacing the position of the head wolf (head sheep, etc.), and then letting them continue to live together as they were, so it is relatively easy-these group animals have long been accustomed to the situation of "shoulder to shoulder", as long as food Plenty and a suitable place to stay, they fit into tight spaces easily.

Instead of animals that live in groups, if humans want to domesticate them, how to let them live in a stable in a stable instead of fighting each other to the death is enough to stump the ancient human owners .

For example, until today, it is still difficult for humans to keep a large group of hamsters living in the same small cage for a long time.

However, cats do not seem to meet the above domestication standards:

The meat of cats is too little, and it is not tasty; cats have no labor ability, and they are not herd animals, but solitary hunters, lacking in obedience...

To make matters worse, their food requirements are too high, they almost only eat fish and meat, and at the same time treat humans very arrogantly-it doesn't look like an ideal domestication object.

However, another uninvited small animal has changed the fate of cats in human society, and that is mice.

——With the earliest rise of agriculture in the Middle East, the oldest farmers of mankind finally had a stable source of food, so they gradually gave up migration and hunting, and began to gather into permanent villages, and build warehouses and store food.

However, what these prehistoric humans did not expect was that with the appearance of the granary, the mice also moved in!

Compared to looking for grass seeds in the wild, it is obviously a more comfortable and enjoyable way of life for the mice to get into the human granary to eat. In this way, the oldest village of human beings is very It's almost becoming a rat's paradise.

However, the primitive humans who had just changed their jobs to farmers found that their lives were messed up by these uninvited guests:

Houses were dug holes by rats, tools were gnawed by rats, food was stolen and polluted by rats, and even babies were bitten by rats in their sleep!

Not to mention that rats can also spread the plague. The story of "one plague, and one village person died" is not uncommon in ancient history.

In addition to rats, snakes that sneaked in and biting people were also a major threat to the ancient farmers who lived together.

Fortunately, just like the barley and wheat in the human granary are fatal to the hungry mice, the large numbers of mice gathered in the human village are also fatal to the hungry cats.

So, at the same time that the mice chased the wheat and vegetables into the human village, the cats also followed the mice and came to the human beings, bringing great surprises to the human beings who were suffering from the rats. They're small enough to do little damage or steal grain, so let them go at first.

When people discovered that cats would prey on snakes and rats, they even took the initiative to get close to and feed cats, which also gave cats a reason to gain a foothold in human society.

Moreover, the deceptively cute appearance of cats is also an important reason for their acceptance by humans.

——If we observe and summarize carefully, we will find that all human beings and mammals in infancy have the following common features: large head-to-body ratio, round and big eyes, thick short limbs, soft skin or down...

To describe it in the most concise words, it can be roughly summed up as "short, round, soft and warm".

The long evolutionary process of tens of millions of years has endowed mammalian cubs with these characteristics that are easy to sell, mainly for the purpose of being able to obtain the love of their mothers and the nurturing of other females after losing their mothers, so as to obtain a greater chance of survival.

However, even after the cat reaches full adulthood, it still retains the "short, round, soft and warm" appearance characteristics, coupled with its small size, it is not threatening to humans, but has the credit for catching mice. won the love of mankind.

In this way, from about 5000 years ago, ancient humans who entered the agricultural civilization began to be unable to resist the temptation of cats, and tried to take cats home and domesticate them.

Even the Chinese ancestors far in the east once tried to domesticate the wild cats around them, but unfortunately they failed in the end—or they were preempted by the Egyptians before they had time to domesticate successfully.

The ancient Egyptians were the first to domesticate cats as pets for the following reasons:

First, because keeping dogs can help with hunting, and keeping cats can only be used for catching mice, human beings will not have the demand for keeping cats until they enter the agricultural society and have more food surplus.

The Mesopotamian Civilization and Ancient Egyptian Civilization in the Middle East were the first places in the world where the agricultural revolution broke out, so they were also the first places to domesticate cats, and naturally the earliest results will be produced;

Second, wild cats are solitary and vigilant lonely hunters. For them, a human village with many mice is just a hunting ground with rich food, not a place to build cat nests and give birth to kittens warm home.

Therefore, no matter how much food there is in human villages, the lonely wild cats in ancient times were more inclined to settle in the wilderness away from human habitation than to be human cohabitation partners.

However, Egypt's geographical environment is very special, except for a Nile River, it is a desolate and dead desert.

On both sides of the Nile River are densely populated villages and towns, and there are few open fields.

No matter how aloof and uninhibited the nature of wild cats are, they can't make a home in the desert. They can only pinch their noses and be neighbors with humans on the crowded Nile River.

Over time, Egyptian cats have become accustomed to getting along with humans day and night. Even if they go one step further, entering the house and being raised by humans, there are not many psychological obstacles for these Egyptian cats who are used to seeing humans.

Third, the ancient Egyptians’ fanatical kneeling and licking posture towards cats is also something other peoples in the world can’t learn. Other farming peoples in this world want to domesticate cats, but they want a mouse catcher and snake catcher. Helper, at most, I will make a guest appearance as a toy that I knead and knead in my spare time.

However, the ancient Egyptians really worshiped the cats as masters and gods! ! !

——More than 5000 years ago, the Egyptians living on the banks of the Nile River, just like the early farming peoples in other parts of the world, encountered the distress of rats. Of course, they also discovered cats, the active mouse catchers.

So far, it seems that it is no different from other ethnic groups.

However, the Egyptian priests who were good at observing were very keen to discover that the eyes of cats would change with the movement of the sun. The pupils of the cats were slits during the day, but the pupils became round at night.

So, the Egyptian priests suddenly came to inspiration, thinking that they had discovered the truth: it turned out that the cat was the incarnation of the moon goddess!

In this way, in Egyptian religious mythology, a female cat god named Bast appeared.

And the supreme god of Egypt is the sun god "Ra", so the cat god Bastet, who represents the moon, is naturally second only to the supreme god-if the sun god "Ra" is compared to the Buddha Sakyamuni, then the cat god Buster is also at least equivalent to Avalokiteshvara.

As we all know, the more people have just escaped from the ignorant ancient society, the more pious people's belief in gods will be.

Therefore, the ancient Egyptians built a luxurious temple for the cat god Bastet, and raised many full-time priests dedicated to the cat god. Buster's temple, offering generous sacrifices.

Then, in order to expand their power and influence, these Egyptian priests who worshiped the goddess of cats, Bastet, continued to build on this foundation, elevating the status of cats infinitely, claiming that devotion to cats is devotion to God!Worshiping cats is worshiping God!

In this way, the ancient Egyptians were fooled into becoming the most pious cat slaves in the world from around 3000 BC when the civilization was founded. All kinds of food to feed them.

But... a disobedient little thing like a cat is really hard to tame!

Although the ancient Egyptians worshiped cats as gods, the wild cats still ignored the Egyptians. No matter how much fish and meat they ate as tributes, they would not go home with the Egyptians to enjoy the offerings.

Still, the devout Egyptians were apparently resilient when it came to worshiping cat gods.

Despite being slapped in the face by cats again and again, he still continues to stick his hot face to his cold ass again and again.

In this way, the ancient Egyptians persevered and persevered in feeding cats for more than 1000 years. During this period, they did not know how many times they were scratched by cats. Finally, around 1600 BC to 1900 BC (the specific age is disputed), The initial domestication of the Egyptian desert cat was successful, making the cat a family member of the Egyptians.

The evidence is that on the ancient Egyptian murals before this, there are only scenes of cats hunting in the wild.And in the ancient Egyptian murals after this era, the picture of cats living together with people finally appeared, which shows that cats have entered the families of Egyptians.

Meow's Story

With the successful domestication of cats, a series of "cat protection laws" were quickly drafted in Egypt.

——According to the Egyptian law at that time, cats were super-protected animals, and it was forbidden to export cats abroad without the special approval of the pharaoh;

If an Egyptian finds a dead cat on the street, he must stand still and shout "This cat didn't kill him", and then ask the guards to find out the truth;

If someone has the audacity to kill a cat, whether it is intentional or unintentional, Egyptian or foreigner, he will be treated the same as a murderer, and the immediate death penalty will not be discussed;

If a cat died, the whole family had to shave their eyebrows in mourning.

As we all know, the most famous thing in ancient Egypt, besides the pyramids, are the mummies.

But what many people don’t know is that rich Egyptian families also mummify their dead cats, hoping that their souls can return to their side after resurrection... In order to prevent the cat master from being hungry after resurrection, and At the same time, he made a mouse mummy to be buried with him - he is really the top cat slave!

Although ancient Egypt banned the export of cats by law, its protection is comparable to that of giant pandas after the founding of my country.

However, the number of Egyptian cats is much more than that of giant pandas after all, and the ruling ability of the Egyptian government is not as strong as that of New China.After a long time, some Egyptian cats were finally sold overseas by illegal traders and fell into the hands of the Greeks and Phoenicians, two seafaring peoples.

Obviously, among the Greeks and Phoenicians, cats did not enjoy the same status as gods, but were treated as ordinary animals.

As a result, cats were continued to be resold to more distant places, but the speed of spread seemed to be quite slow-according to the history books of the Greeks, until the time of Alexander the Great's Eastern Expedition, the "barbarians" of Thrace and Caucasus had never seen Cat.

At that time, the Persians did not have the habit of raising cats, and only a small number of Egyptian cats existed in the court as rare birds and animals.

Then, around the time of the birth of Jesus, the Greeks, Persians and Romans were already generally raising cats.

In India, which is more eastern, since Alexander the Great's Eastern Expedition, pet cats have also appeared.

However, China at this time is still a "cat-free zone". Even with the respect of Emperor Qin and Han Wu, he can't enjoy the fun of petting and sucking cats.

Because the Chinese have never been able to successfully domesticate the native wild cats, they can only wait for foreign domestic cats to be introduced to the Central Plains.

Therefore, the Chinese, who had no cats to rub, just stretched their necks and looked at the far west, from the Shang Dynasty to the Zhou Dynasty, from the Zhou Dynasty to the Qin Dynasty, and from the Qin Dynasty to the Western Han Dynasty, but they still couldn’t get a cat— ——When Zhang Qian first "traveled to the Western Regions" in the Western Han Dynasty, the "domestic version" of cats in Egypt had not been widely spread to Central Asia, so Zhang Qian could not bring cats and grapes back together.

Until the time of Emperor Hanming in the Eastern Han Dynasty, monks from Tianzhu followed the road to the Western Regions opened by Banchao again, and came to Luoyang to build the White Horse Temple. The domestic cat was finally introduced to the Central Plains from the Western Regions along with the Buddhist scriptures, and the Chinese ended the era of no cats to masturbate. Hard times.

Another 500 years later, during the Southern and Northern Dynasties, domestic cats really entered thousands of households in China and became common pets among the people.

In the heyday of the Tang Dynasty, in order to learn the advanced culture of the Central Plains, the Japanese imperial court did not hesitate to spend a lot of money, sending batch after batch of Tang envoys and learned monks to study in China, and then returned from the Central Plains with a large number of Buddhist scriptures, classics, calligraphy and paintings, and notes. .

But the problem is, as we all know, no matter what era of sea ships, the hateful figure of rats is indispensable.

As a result, the books and scriptures brought back by the Japanese envoys to the Tang Dynasty were easily bitten by the rats on the ship on the way home. After the painful lesson of turning into paper scraps and returning home empty-handed for many years”, the later Japanese envoys sent to the Tang Dynasty followed the advice of the people of the Tang Dynasty to keep cats on board the returning ships to drive away rats.

Therefore, these cats from the Tang Dynasty came to Japan along with the books and scriptures on the boat sent to Tang Dynasty.

Because these cats came back with the overseas monks who went to China to study Buddhism and the noble officials who studied culture.Therefore, the number of cats in Japan was very rare at the beginning, and they were treasures that only the royal relatives could enjoy, as well as guests of the imperial palace.

However, cats are very fertile animals.With the passage of time, cats have multiplied more and more in Japan, becoming less rare, even ordinary people can see them, and there are even cats wandering in the wild.

In the Edo period 1000 years later, the "Old Wang Xietangqian cat" finally ran into the homes of ordinary people.In Japan, the popularization from court to folk, from aristocratic to common people has been completed.From the mansion of the samurai to the huts of the peasants, there are cats everywhere.

On the streets and alleys all over Japan, you can see "Niaojiang" lying on the courtyard wall sleeping soundly, crossing the street carefully, and burying its head in the garbage dump for food.

As cats became more and more common in the lives of ordinary people in Japan, various proverbs about cats in modern Japanese also appeared in the Edo period, and the frequency of use became more and more frequent.For example, "猫尾" (ねこじた) means that the tongue is afraid of being hot; "猫头" (猫の额) means that the area is small; It means very busy and understaffed.

Then, in the late Showa era and the Heisei era, with the rise of moe culture and Japanese animation sweeping the world, the image of cats has once again leapt and sublimated in Japanese society, completely surpassing the category of ordinary pets and becoming a symbol of love and cuteness. !

So far, the "Cute Meow Era" has come to Japan. All kinds of Japanese cat culture, mainly driven by Japanese animation, not only swept across the islands explosively, but also successfully rushed out of the country and went to the whole world. In addition to Lucky Cat, there are two other virtual Japanese cats that have fans all over the world, namely Doraemon and HelloKitty!

If the beckoning cat represents the traditional folk customs of Japan, then Doraemon and Hello Kitty represent the modern culture of Japan, and they have also been officially certified-the "special ambassador" of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Bid Committee is Doraemon !

In addition, there are countless cartoon images of cats, cat ears, cat gods and cat demons.

Next, because in Japanese, meow is pronounced similarly to "2".Therefore, since 1987, cat lovers in Japan have established the "Cat Day Executive Committee" and specially set February 2 as "Cat Day" to thank the company of cats for the joy and happiness brought to people. .

On this special day, many cat lovers have uploaded their cute cat photos to have a lively festival on the Internet.

And Japanese merchants also took the opportunity to launch a variety of cat-themed products at high prices during this cat festival, such as cat ice cream, cat donuts, cat ear hairpins and so on.

In this way, a variety of cat-themed products are constantly being introduced in the market, constantly meeting the current needs of Japanese "cat lovers", while constantly exploring and stimulating their potential needs.And this long chain of demand was finally converted into a long chain of interests, which has now developed to the point where it can significantly promote the development of Japan's economy!

In view of the successful business cases of cat cafes, cat-ear maid restaurants, cat ice cream, and cat-ear girl idol groups, some Japanese scholars vowed: "No matter what field, as long as cats are used correctly, the economy will improve."

——It seems that after 30 years of sinking, the desperate Japanese economy may be rescued by cats, right?

Finally, I wish everyone a happy Meow's Day!