– reported that the death of a cat prompted all those in the household to shave their eyebrows. The pet would then be embalmed. One cemetery unearthed at Beni Hasan in 1888 was said to contain the remains of 80,000 cats. A 20-tonne consignment of the corpses was later exported to Liverpool as fertiliser. One or two of the mummified moggies were saved for posterity by the city’s museum. The human relationship with cats may predate ancient Egypt, with the suggestion that the felines began domesticating themselves during the Early Neolithic period; as sparrows and mice were drawn to Natufian grain stores and spoil heaps over 10,000 years ago, so cats were drawn to the sparrows and mice. A rise in the feline population may have been further sustained on proffered titbits from people, as well as rummaging through our mounting piles of rubbish.
Like the house mouse, the domestic cat first appeared in Britain towards the end of the Neolithic, with signs of the species at Gussage All Saints and Danebury Hillfort – just like those of its famous rodent quarry. Could it be that the cat’s pest control qualities were appreciated in Iron Age Britain? Cats were, however, rare until medieval times. The earliest written record dates to the reign of the Welsh king Howell the Good (880–950 CE), who issued the edict that anyone slaying or stealing a cat was liable for a financial penalty calculated in terms of the equivalent cost in grain: ‘The worth of a cat that is killed or stolen; its head is to be put downwards upon a clean even floor, with its tail lifted upwards, and thus suspended, whilst wheat is poured about it, until the tip of its tail be covered.’ Today, an estimated nine million cats prowl Britain’s towns and countryside, each year snaffling some 100 million prey items, including mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. One 1987 study from the village of Felmersham in Bedfordshire implicated cats in almost a third of house sparrow deaths. It seems old habits die hard.
Perhaps the greatest feline felony is a crime of passion. As with cows and pigs, keeping apart wild and domesticated versions often proves futile. The same seems true of pet pussies and Britain’s own native wildcat, an endangered beast confined to the forested margins of Scottish moorland. The two versions have interbred so often that hybrids now dominate the wildcat population. Conservationists worry that too much domestic cat in the genome of the wildcat weakens it and leaves an animal which is already threatened by habitat loss and persecution close to extinction.
The arrival in Britain of a tabby of a different sort is also linked with the advent of Neolithic agriculture. Also known as the grease moth, the large tabby gets its name from the uncanny resemblance that its forewings bear to cat fur. With an appetite for dried dung, dead skin, old feathers, bits of straw and other unmentionable detritus, tabby larvae probably first hitched a ride here ensconced in livestock bedding. Suggesting that its natural habitat might once have been caves, the insect lurks in the gloomy recesses of stables and outhouses, where the larvae spin protective silken tubes about themselves then munch away undisturbed on their rarefied diet for up to two years before turning into adults.
A similar niche is exploited by dermestid beetles, many of whose 1,000 species and subspecies are spread by human migrations and globalised trade. Some are specialist scavengers on desiccated animal remains including hides, furs, feathers, tendons and bone, and a few are associated with Egyptian mummies, as well as with human remains from Middle Bronze Age sites in the southern Levant where the larvae drilled tunnels into the bone. Museum taxidermists still use these insects to nibble flesh from animal skeletons prior to display. Some dermestids could have reached Britain as early as the Neolithic period in the same way as the large tabby moth.
Among a number of non-native insect pests arriving in crop shipments is the grain weevil, a flightless species measuring around four millimetres when full-grown. Mated females each produce 150 eggs or more, which are deposited individually into grain kernels. The developing larvae feed there for up to six months before pupation, after which the adults chew their way out of the now-empty seed hulls. There’s a theory that before agriculture came along the grain weevil’s Asian ancestors lived on food scraps in bird or rodents’ nests, before dispensing with wings altogether and becoming wholly dependent on human food stores. If true, this was a good move, as today the weevil plagues food stores worldwide, gorging on wheat, barley, rye, oats, corn, rice and millet, as well as a range of processed goodies from chocolate to pasta. The earliest western European record is from Early Neolithic Germany up to 7,000 years ago, and the insect is confirmed in Britain from the first century CE. Today, the UK alone spends an estimated £6.5 million annually on pesticides to control these and other non-native invertebrate pests of stored grains and fodder crops, including the saw-toothed grain beetle, foreign grain beetle and the red flour beetle, as well as mites and moths.
The unparalleled growth in human population and radical change in lifestyle unleashed by the Neolithic revolution benefited a different class of invading organisms; organisms that made their livelihoods not just among us, but on and even inside us. Harmful bacteria, viruses, protozoa, fungi, intestinal worms, ticks, lice and fleas, and myriad other nasties had always been present in the environment. For example, the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis, which still kills around three million people annually, was probably infecting the very earliest hominids in East Africa millions of years ago. The guts of hunter-gatherers are thought to have been crawling with roundworm, hookworm and other helminth worms, and their wounds quickly got infested with staphylococcal bacteria. In addition, a miscellany of animal-borne diseases may have infected humans before the Neolithic, from sleeping sickness and schistosomiasis to monkey malaria. But as soon as we started to form dense, semi-permanent, settlements, living side by side with livestock, and inadvertently drinking water contaminated by our own waste (never a good idea), harmful parasites and pathogens of all shapes and sizes were allowed to reach epidemic proportions for the first time.
For instance, the measles virus, in order to persist and spread, requires a sedentary population of up to half a million people with a continually replenishing supply of previously uninfected children. Malaria, yellow fever, diphtheria, leprosy, smallpox, influenza and the common cold are among a wide range of other ‘civilisation diseases’ thought to have benefited from our change of habits, many hopping from domesticated animal to human during, or after, the Neolithic. (The species-jumping may have gone both ways, with evidence that humans could have passed on harmful worms as well as certain other parasites and pathogens to their livestock, rather than vice-versa.) Furthermore, as we have seen, agriculture boosted populations of rodents, birds, invertebrates and other agents of disease. Even without close-living humans, grain stores, and herds of livestock, disturbance to the environment wrought by farming itself probably facilitated the spread of parasites and pathogens. For example, the deforested habitat resulting from slash-and-burn agriculture continues to favour malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
Britain’s remote location, temperate conditions and relatively late adoption of modern farming may have helped its people avoid early epidemics. However, disease outbreaks probably became a fact of life by the Bronze Age with the increase in trade with the continent. Indeed, a catastrophic epidemic could explain the extraordinary results of a recent study on ancient human DNA across Europe which indicates that at least 90 per cent of the ancestry of Britons can be traced to the Beaker people. Named for their characteristic bell-shaped pots, this group originated in central and eastern Europe and arrived in Britain some 4,500 years ago, seemingly replacing almost the entire indigenous population. One suggestion is that the pre-Beaker Brits might have succumbed to a disease to which the Beakers were resistant.
Not everything that arrived towards the end of the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age was quite so unwelcome. By around 2,500 years ago, trade routes were beginning to extend to the Far East, courtesy of new imperial roads built by the Persians, facilitating a westward spread of previously unknown plants and animals. During this period, Brits may have got their first taste of a domestic apple, a species originating in the mountains of Central Asia, or ridden their first donkey, derived from wild asses in Egypt.
The woad plant, a member of the cabbage family prized as a source of indigo dye, was another Asian native appearing in Britain around this time. (Extracting the pigment was a complex process, involving huge quantities of leaves, a fair amount of an alkaline substance, such as lime – made
