Once upon a time in a far - off medieval Gallic monastery , a Roman Catholic Pope cite Gregory declare it acceptable to consume savage rabbits – called laurices – during lent because , as it turn out , they werefish .
French monks far and widely chased after the quick - footed flossy beast to confine and breed them within monastery walls .
And just like that bunny went from rove dotty nomad to the domesticated fluffy friends we cognize today .
go a bit off to you ? Well , that ’s because the narrative of original bunny domestication is one that was plausibly made up , but the story held . One scientist even turn to it to try out a new DNA modeling method .
“ I had cited it , colleagues of mine had cited it , it ’s all over Wikipedia and the web , ” said Greger Larson , lead author and investigator atOxford University , in astatement .
As any unspoilt scientist would do , Larson and his alumnus student Evan Irving - Pease began to dig deeper into the tale and regain that it was actually a misinterpretation dating back to themid-1900s .
“ It twist out that the mod account is a complete house of card , ” suppose Larson .
The study instead revealed a much more intricate story ofdomestication . involve a multi - faceted approach , researchers analyzed genetics , historical documents , archaeologic remains , and fogey grounds .
They compared the genomes of wild to domestic rabbits to see how long it took for them to depart . They thought it would level to around 600 AD , but found that domestication did n’t engagement to a specific event and or else acquire over time .
Archaeological records show that it all started with hunt during the Paleolithic era . historic document reveal that Romans were the first to keep the downy critters in hutches for training . Flash - forward a few hundred geezerhood to the Medieval Ages and rabbits were transport around the continent , being served up on dinner party plate as a delicacy .
Larson aver it ’s human nature to pinpoint changes to one specific point in time , but that does n’t make it precise .
" We really have fuss appreciating boring , continuous variety over prospicient point of time , " he said . " Our narrative structures work much well if you have a eureka moment . "
Not only does this change the way we should guess about domestication – as a culmination of events over time rather than one aha moment – but it solicit the question of whether or not human ever mean to do it .
What we do know is that the summons of scientific discipline is gradual and each discovery lends itself to the next . The way we look at the domestication of rabbits serves as a bigger metaphor for how scientists might look at their own discipline .
