The "domestic" mouse and human habitation

Angela

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See:
https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2017/03/mouse-in-house-tells-tale-of-human.html

""The research provides the first evidence that, as early as 15,000 years ago, humans were living in one place long enough to impact local animal communities—resulting in the dominant presence of house mice," said Fiona Marshall, study co-author and a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. "It's clear that the permanent occupation of these settlements had far-reaching consequences for local ecologies, animal domestication and human societies."

Marshall, a noted expert on animal domestication, considers the research exciting because it shows that settled hunter-gatherers rather than farmers were the first people to transform environmental relations with small mammals. By providing stable access to human shelter and food, hunter-gatherers led house mice down the path to commensalism, an early phase of domestication in which a species learns how to benefit from human interaction.

The findings have broad implications for the processes that led to animal domestication.

"The findings provide clear evidence that the ways humans have shaped the natural world are tied to varying levels of human mobility," said Marshall, the James W. and Jean L. Davis Professor in Arts & Sciences. "They suggest that the roots of animal domestication go back to human sedentism thousands of years prior to what has long been considered the dawn of agriculture.""

This dovetails nicely with the youtube video I posted recently where John Hawkes discusses the revolution that started with the Natufians. He made the further point that it was the climate and abundant food resources of the Levant at that time that allowed the Natufians to become sedentary.

The article is discussing this paper:

Lior Weissbrod et al:
[h=1]"Origins of house mice in ecological niches created by settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant 15,000 y ago"[/h]
"Reductions in hunter-gatherer mobility during the Late Pleistocene influenced settlement ecologies, altered human relations with animal communities, and played a pivotal role in domestication. The influence of variability in human mobility on selection dynamics and ecological interactions in human settlements has not been extensively explored, however. This study of mice in modern African villages and changing mice molar shapes in a 200,000-y-long sequence from the Levant demonstrates competitive advantages for commensal mice in long-term settlements. Mice from African pastoral households provide a referential model for habitat partitioning among mice taxa in settlements of varying durations. The data reveal the earliest known commensal niche for house mice in long-term forager settlements 15,000 y ago. Competitive dynamics and the presence and abundance of mice continued to fluctuate with human mobility through the terminal Pleistocene. At the Natufian site of Ain Mallaha, house mice displaced less commensal wild mice during periods of heavy occupational pressure but were outcompeted when mobility increased. Changing food webs and ecological dynamics in long-term settlements allowed house mice to establish durable commensal populations that expanded with human societies. This study demonstrates the changing magnitude of cultural niche construction with varying human mobility and the extent of environmental influence before the advent of farming."

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/03/21/1619137114

This is a technical distinction that is sometimes lost on people. The Natufians were intensively collecting wild grains and other foodstuffs, using scythes invented for that purpose, storing them, grinding them etc. With time, they began to replant them in convenient areas, which is technically cultivation. Finally, people began to experiment with actual domestication. It was a process of thousands of years.
 

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