Newer Than They Think / Animals And Plants

• Camels weren't introduced to Ancient Egypt until fairly late in the New Kingdom, and then only as a source of milk, meat, and hair, not as beasts of burden or riding animals.
  • Camels didn't make it to the Maghreb until about 300... AD. Try to tell that to all those strategy games that give camel units to Carthage during the Punic Wars!
  • Camels, and their relatives the llamas, did not arrive in the Old World and South America until a mere 2-3 million years ago. For context, they had been living in North America for about 40 million years already!
• Plains Natives are always shown in movies riding horses. However, the native North American horse had gone extinct long before Europeans arrived and was never domesticated. The horses the natives acquired later came from European horses that had escaped, were stolen in raids, or purchased from Europeans.
  • When Spanish explorers first encountered the Plains Natives in the 16th century, said Natives were using sled dogs for transport.
  • Sid Meier's Colonization gets this right, only giving the Natives mounted units when they've acquired horses from the Europeans.
  • Age of Empires II plays it further straight in that the American civs don't get any mounted units unless they convert them of capture stables.
  • Even when horses are correctly portrayed as being introduced by Europeans, they are often assumed to have passed to the Natives almost as soon as contact happened. In reality the spread of the horse in the American West and the Great Plains was kickstarted by the Pueblo Revolt against the Spanish in 1680 and happened largely through the 18th century. The Iroquois acquired horses independently from the British or French around the 1690s, and the Mapuche in South America were the first to raise their own cavalry between the 1560s and 1590s (baring some sporadic use by the Incas in the 1530s revolt).
• Horses weren't present in the Middle East either until the second millennium BC, when they were introduced by invading peoples from the Eurasian steppes to the north. Both the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations developed without horses (although they had donkeys). Actually riding horses was even later, around 900 BCE in the eastern Mediterranean, placing it well into the Iron Age. During the Bronze Age, horses' primary role in combat was drawing war chariots.
• Although the dog has been domesticated for tens of thousands of years, a recent study determined that only 14 out of 85 tested breeds are thought to be "ancient breeds" or what we call Older Than Feudalism. (There are over 300 known dog breeds, so more extensive testing might reveal additional ancient breeds.) The idea of registered, pedigreed, "purebred" dogs is an innovation of the 19th century; most breeds did not become closed breeding pools until the 1800s. Many breeds did not even exist until recently; for example, German Shepherds were first recognized as a breed in 1899.
  • Many dog breeds are even newer than that; the English Bulldog we're familiar with wasn't developed until after the turn of the century; the modern Poodle has origins that go back centuries but the current look is a 20th century development; the oldest modern Labrador Retriever was born in 1899 and the subtypes weren't established until the 1930s.
  • The breeds in question: Afghan Hound, Akita Inu, Alaskan Malamute, Basenji, Chow Chow, Lhasa Apso, Pekingese, Saluki, Samoyed, Shar Pei, Shiba Inu, Shih Tzu, Siberian Husky, and Tibetan Terrier. All of these have genetic structures that resemble wolves to a marked degree.
  • To say nothing of the reversal of purebreeding (deliberate crossbreeding), the first of which being the labradoodle, which was first bred in the late 1980s for a blind woman who needed a hypoallergenic guide dog.
  • Three breeds that have ancient histories, the Norwegian Elkhound, Pharaoh Hound and Ibizan Hound, did not turn out to have ancient DNA structure. Not surprising, since these three breeds were close to extinction and were "recreated" by breeding the few remaining individuals with other breeds, thus diluting their DNA. Other breeds that have long histories, such as Greyhounds, were extensively crossbred in the 1800s and have lost their original DNA structure.
  • However, at this point it cannot be said that any dog breed is more or less closely related to wolves than any other. All of the tested breeds seem to derive from the same small number of domestication events.
    • Dingos may actually be the one of oldest "breeds" of dogs, although they were not tested in this study.
    • New Guinea's singing dog probably predates even the dingo.
• Because marsupials use a reproductive strategy that is popularly regarded as "primitive", kangaroos are often assumed to be an ancient genus on par with "living fossils". In fact, the larger, grazing varieties of 'roo only arose about five million years ago, evolving from the wallabies which preceded them more recently than our own lineage split off from that of chimpanzees.
  • It's the same with monotremes — while the platypus is indeed a living fossil and the oldest living mammal family, echidnas only evolved in the Oligocene, after most of the more advanced groups of mammals, like primates.
• That rabbit that is found everywhere in Europe and a pest in Australia was originally an endemism of the Iberian Peninsula. The Romans, who introduced it in other places for hunting purposes, didn't even have a specific word for "rabbit" (see below), using terms like "small hare" or "digging hare" instead. The first domestic rabbits appeared only in the Middle Ages.
  • "Rabbit" was originally the word for the young of the species. The general word for the species (and if you know The Lord of the Rings, or early translations of The Bible, you have encountered it) was "coney" (which probably comes from the Spanish "conejo", which in turn derives from the Iberian "cunicŭlus"), as in the name of Coney Island, named for the animal, because of their presence there in the colonial era. This particular term evolved into the modern "bunny" and then was quietly forgotten, for reasons you might be able to guess.
  • Rabbits were introduced to Australia in the year 1859, by a wealthy landowner in order to conduct hunting parties, and have become an exemplar of why introducing a foreign species into an enviroment where their evolutionary niche has not been fulfilled is a catastrophic idea.
• Rats were not always living in nearly every part of the world, and were not always looked down upon. The most familiar species, the Norway rat, came from northern China into Europe near the end of the Black Death. It was the Indochinese black rat that came first, in the 1st century.
• Pheasants were introduced in Europe from Central Asia in the Middle Ages, and later into North America.
• Barring Hanno's account (whose gorillai might or might not have been real gorillas, despite inspiring their name) and a few obscure reports from Portuguese Angola, the gorilla was not known outside Africa until 1847, roughly two centuries after the first chimps and orangutans had been brought to Europe. This makes the presence of gorilla-like creatures in pre-19th-century fiction (Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest, for example) very interesting indeed.
  • Related to this, the efforts to put a barrier between the words "monkey" on one hand and "ape" and "simian" on the other are a late 20th century phenomenon. For the longest time "monkey", "ape" and "simian" were used interchangeably. All three were probably used first to name the same creature, the Barbary "ape" Macaca sylvanus, a tail-less species of macaque from North Africa.
• As noted on the page for Bluebird of Happiness, bluebirds are native to North America and were unknown in European culture before the 17th century.
• Pandas were unknown to Western civilization until 1869, when Lazarist missionary Armand David became the first to record them in the annals of European science. Interestingly, the animal seems to have been highly obscure even in China until this point; no artwork depicting pandas predates the Western discovery of the species.
• Hyenas were obscure animals in the Western world until the mid-20th century. As late as 1922's Nosferatu, filmmakers could substitute hyenas for wolves and audiences would be none the wiser. In reality, hyenas are feliforms rather than caniforms (meaning that they are genetically closer to cats than dogs).
• Killer bees resulted from a crossbreeding between European honeybees & African bees in Brazil during The '50s. Obviously they escaped & started migrating across the Americas; their arrival in the United States in the late 1970s heralded a wave of apiphobia in popular culture (i.e. The Swarm (1978)).
• The red imported fire-ant [1], native to the Amazon, was first discovered in Australia in 2001, having most likely crossed the Pacific on a cargo ship. At the moment, the outbreak has been contained to the South-East Queensland area, but bio-security officers & people who work in the earth-moving & landscaping sector know how perilous one slip-up could be.
  • Cane toads were imported, also from South America, to Queensland in 1935 to control cane beetles in the sugar-cane plantations. It turned out a dud, as the toads' method of catching prey wasn't applicable to the beetles, but what was amazing was that the native crow eventually figured out how to hunt this completely-new species (since cane-toads' poison glands are located around their cloaca, the crow swoops them from above and flips them upside-down to peck at their delicate underbellies, avoiding the glands.)
• Amphibians weren't considered a separate taxon from reptiles until 1825–or rather, reptiles were not distinct from amphibians. Amphibia is the older name.
• Authors that want to be a little clever in their historical British tales, may use the red kite rather than falcons or eagles as symbols of untamed wilderness. However, the red kite was historically an over-populous urban bird, playing the role pigeons and gulls play today. The Tudor-era Vermin Act began the extirpation of the bird until it was reduced to a tiny population clinging to the remotest parts of Wales, hence its wilderness image. Researchers reintroduced the kite rurally, only to discover the population is moving back into the urban environment just as the historical writings describe.
• Megalodon is often shown coexisting with and going extinct along with the dinosaurs, even in works which carefully avoid making the same mistake with other popular Cenozoic creatures like mammoths and sabre-tooth cats. In reality, the giant shark first evolved around 15.9 million years ago, almost 40 million years after the dinosaurs died, and died out about 2.6 million years ago — after the evolution of bipedal apes (but before that of true humans).
  • Sharks as a whole are this. While a lot of writers say that sharks have been around "longer than trees", since 350 million years ago, this isn't entirely true. Sharks as we know them today only appeared toward the end of the Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago.
• While grasses were around at least as early as 120 million years ago, they didn't become the widespread, ubiquitous lifeform they are today, or in any familiar forms, existing only in small pockets or so until the very end of the Cretaceous period. Thus, any depictions of the Mezosoic with grass all over the ground would be anachronistic, unless it's shortly before that famous meteor that killed off the dinosaurs.
  • Flowering plants didn't exist at all until the Cretaceous, far succeeding the dinosaurs, who first appeared 100 million years earlier during the Late Triassic. Seed plants (which includes conifers and cycads, in addition to angiosperms) have existed for longer (and the whole Plantae kingdom even longer), but not flowering plants. Stegosaurs and Brachiosaurs had all died out before there was even a thing called grass.
• Keeping hamsters as pets is a relatively recent thing. Golden Hamsters were discovered in 1839 and they started being used as lab animals in the 1930s. Hamster domestication thus dates back to the 1930s at earliest.
• Domestic cats have been bred for thousand of years, but most breeds are relatively new. For example, the Sphynx dates back to the 1960s (and the two main lines date back only to 1975 and 1978) and the modern Persian dates back to the 1800s.
• A lot of dog and cat breeds looked radically different as little as 100 years ago. Bull Terriers didn't gain their signature egg-shaped heads until the early 1900s, Dachshunds had longer legs in the 1800s, and many short-muzzled dogs had much longer muzzles two centuries ago. This also applies to cats to a degree. The commonplace flat-faced Persian dates back to attempts to produce red-furred Persians in the 1960s (and they were still almost unheard-of until the mid-1990s).
  • The notion of a cat "breed" didn't exist until the late 19th century, since any cat can catch vermin. They only began to be selectively bred on a large scale with the rise of "fancy cat" shows, hence why cat breeds are based almost entirely on appearance rather than function. The Maine Coon and the Norwegian Forest Cat are among the few cat breeds developed for functional reasons; specifically, they were bred for cold-tolerance in the harsh climates of their homelands.
• The association of monkeys with bananas was popularized in the 1970s by naturalist Jane Gooddall, who was widely depicted offering them to the apes she studied. In reality, monkeys do not have a particular preference for bananas, but enjoy anything sweet; additionally, the bananas associated with monkeys are invariably Cavendish bananas, which do not exist in the wild and have only been widely sold since the 1950s.
• Carrots weren't always widely associated with rabbits (the other Stock Animal Diet of rabbits, lettuce, is actually much older). It's not certain when this began, but it wasn't the case in media until Bugs Bunny started eating them in 1940. Originally, his eating carrots and saying "What's up, doc?" were both references to a scene in It Happened One Night (1934) where Clark Gable does the same thing. There are older examples of fictional rabbits eating carrots, but they were shown to love other vegetables as well.
• Most earthworms in North America are not native but accidentally introduced in the 18th century and after, and have strongly altered the ecology of forests as they've migrated westward.
• Cat litter (and, by extension, the litter box) was invented in 1947 by American businessman Ed Lowe.
• Although popularly considered to be living fossils that have been unchanged for hundreds of millions of years, modern-type crocodilians only appeared near the end of the Late Cretaceous and modern genera appeared millions of years after that (during the Eocene, when most modern mammals and bird groups were also appearing). The niche of "riverine ambush predator" was also actually just one of many occupied by them back in prehistoric times; the very last fully terrestrial forms only died out about three-thousand years ago.
• The Earth itself has only been habitable by humans (and all other extant life on this planet) for about half of its existence, the Great Oxygenation Event which filled our atmosphere with breathable air taking place approximately 2.4 to 2.1 billion years ago, spurred on by the evolution of photosynthesis in one specific group of bacteria (the cyanobacteria, which still exist - and thrive - to this day)^note and as far as we know, photosynthesis only ever evolved once - hundreds of millions of years ago, a primordial eukaryotic proto-plant attempted to consume a cyanobacterium but it instead became the first chloroplast, the organelle which is the means by which all plants and their allies photosynthesize. Any time traveler going back three billion years to learn the origin of life had better take a spacesuit or they would suffocate and die in minutes.
• When pop-culture wants to represent the evolution of reptiles (312 million years ago) as the definitive independence of vertebrates from the waters, they'll show frog-like eggs turning into hard, mineralized eggs like chicken eggs. But such hard egg shells are exclusive to archosaurs (the group that includes dinosaurs, crocodiles, and birds among others), which only appeared 250 million years ago. Other reptiles like lizards, snakes, and turtles (and also mammals like the platypus) lay eggs with impermeable, but soft and elastic shells.
• The lovebug, a now-ubiquitous insect in the American South, was first described in 1940, and even sightings of it only go back to 1911 at the earliest.
• Seasonal migration of birds was not understood until the late 18th century, before which most thinkers assumed that birds hibernated during winter; observers had obviously known that birds could move from place to place, but had no idea how far they traveled, or that cold weather was the cause. The first solid proof of seasonal bird migration appeared in 1822, when a stork arrived in Germany pierced by an arrow made of Central African wood. Even then, until at least the late 19th century, at least some bird species were still thought to hibernate ^note There is, actually, one bird that does hibernate: the common poorwill
• The Canada goose, that ubiquitous North American nuisance, wasn't widespread through the continent until the 1980s at the earliest. One subspecies, the giant Canada goose, was thought to be extinct as late as 1962, when a small flock was discovered and bred.
• The titan arum, the largest flower in the world, was first described in 1878, before which it was known only to the locals in the Sumatran jungle.
• The Mars ♂ and Venus ♀ symbols were first used to denote the male and female sexes in 1751 by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, and even then, he applied them only to plants. Before that, they were used merely as shorthand in astrology for Mars and Venus. The symbols were first applied to humans in anthropological kinship diagrams, the oldest known of which dates to 1871.
• The woolly mammoth survived in certain regions of Russia until about 2000BC, about 600 years after the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.
• Peppermint was first described in 1753 by botanist Carl Linnaeus; it is a hybrid between watermint and spearmint.
• The sea otter was not discovered by Europeans until the late 1700s.
• At first glance, extinct megafauna like the alarmingly large Haast's eagle, as well as its prey, the moa, seem to be long-forgotten prehistoric creatures of the kind you'd see in a cheap action film set in Hollywood Prehistory. In fact, the Haast's eagle was still flying around the forests of New Zealand when Dante was writing The Divine Comedy in Renaissance Italy. The eagles didn't disappear because of some ancient disaster, either; they died out after Maori settlers, who themselves had only arrived on the islands during the Late Middle Ages, began hunting the moa for their own food. Given the eagles' sheer size, it's not unlikely that they killed some of the Maori in turn.
• The word "donkey" is first attested in 1785, being a polite substitute for "ass", which had become by then a homophone for "arse".
• Donkeys are an iconic symbol of the Irish countryside, especially in the West, but they actually weren't commonly used in Ireland until after 1800. This is born out by the fact that there is no native Irish word for "donkey;" the Irish word asal is borrowed from Latin asellus.
• Adding to the list of "domesticated animal breeds that aren't as ancient as people think," specific horse breeds (such as Thoroughbreds, Clydesdales, etc,) are often seen as ancient and enduring. While horse TYPES have always been bred for various functions and local records can be quite detailed, the full concept of "acceptable bloodlines who are recorded in a (literal or metaphorical) registry" only took off in modern times, and the beginnings of "horse breeding" in Europe usually start around the 15th century or later.
• The Cretaceous Period was long, some 79 million years long, before its abrupt end with the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago. As a result, many popular dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus, Triceratops, and Velociraptor are actually closer in time to us than they were to Jurassic dinosaurs like Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus that they are often depicted alongside in popular culture.
• Although the Romans domesticated hedgehogs as early as the 4th century BC, the practice died out circa 400AD, and hedgehogs were not tamed again until the 1980s; all current domesticated hedgehogs derive from that population.(And in many countries, the idea of hedgehogs as pets is still preposterous.)

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