When Was The Ferret Domesticated?
 
One of the more important aspects of ferret domestication is the timing
of the event: when did it happen?  This importance is in part due to
its obvious historic significance, but it is also important in terms
of ferret legal issues.  One of the more perplexing and frustrating
problems facing ferret owners is the persistent refusal of ill-educated
anti-ferret factions to recognize the ferret is domesticated.  It is
inherently easier to argue that the ferret is a domesticated animal if
the history of domestication has been a long one and it is well
documented.
 
When tracing domestication backwards to an origin point, there are
several avenues of inquiry that can be of use.  Historical records, such
as lithographs, books, paintings, words, magazine articles, letters,
fables, postcards, adverts, names, laws, or sculpture are useful, but
they are only snapshots of singular points in time and they don't extend
past recorded history.  They cannot define an origin point, just a
"this is the oldest known record" point.  The other problem of historic
records is the translations; just because one person defines a word as
translating to ferret, it doesn't mean it is correct or others agree.
Genetic studies, such as mitochondrial DNA, protein electrophoresis, or
genome studies, can illustrate mutative changes that correspond to time
and are extremely good at it, but in species where it is common for
breeders to hybridize the domesticate back to the progenitor, any study
is "contaminated" and the time value is worthless.  Because all languages
evolve, comparative linguistics can be used to infer time to a degree,
but no linguistic studies have been published regarding ferrets, and even
if they had, they define a region of time rather than a point in time.
Archaeology has the techniques and controls to build a reasonable
timeline that extends into prehistory, but the oldest recovered ferret
remains are just a few centuries old, and ferreting equipment does not
preserve well or is rarely identified (was that fragment of netting used
for fishing or ferreting?).  Zooarchaeology could greatly improve the
archaeological record, but the techniques to identify and separate
domesticated ferrets from wild polecats are still under development,
and because of hybridization, they will be somewhat limited.  Without
zooarchaeological techniques, paleontology would not be much use, and
most remains would be far too old for our needs.  In many ways, if time
were a creek, students of ferret domestication would be up it without a
paddle.
 
In criminal investigations there is something called the " chain of
evidence," which is generally defined as tracking the movement and
location of evidence from the time it is obtained to the time it is
presented in court.  By maintaining the chain of evidence, the prosecutor
can go to court and show the evidence was not altered from the time it
was collected to the time it was presented.  Archaeologists attempt to
create a chain of evidence as well, documenting the artifact in its found
position in the ground and giving it a unique identifier so it cannot be
confused with other objects.  Because the position of an artifact in
the ground is coordinated to time, archaeologists spend a great deal of
effort recording the exact position and depth of the tiniest of objects,
and the techniques and records are far more exacting than required for
criminal prosecution.  When the chain of evidence is broken in court,
the evidence can be discounted or thrown out.  When the items in an
archaeological site are mixed, such as when a pothunter or arrowhead
collector digs up a site, the chain is also broken, and the archaeologist
says the item has lost its provenience.  Without provenience, you cannot
accurately assign a date to the object, so it loses its time position and
value.
 
When attempting to assign a date of domestication to any animal, the
attempt is made to recreate a chain of evidence from the present,
stretching back as far a possible.  A common way to do this is by
creating a timeline, made up of items with a known provenience.  For
example, people who frequent eBay will confirm I try to obtain as many
historic documents about ferrets as possible.  The reason is not because
I am a collector, but rather because I am building a timeline of historic
documents with an established provenience (I find collecting for the
sake of collecting quite distasteful; these items are willed to the
Smithsonian and National Archives for others to use).  While this is of
relatively little value to proving the antiquity of ferret domestication,
it has tremendous value in proving the long association of ferrets in a
particular area, such as the United States.  Because of this accumulation
of ferret ephemera from eBay and many other sources, I can now
demonstrate ferrets were used by some Union soldiers during the Civil War
to supplement their field rations, that at least four American ships were
named Ferret, that as early as the 1820s American farmers were encouraged
to budget a pair of ferrets for ratting, and that the fear of contracting
influenza from ferrets (which happened to coincide with the development
of rat poisons) was a major reason for their growing unpopularity after
the first World War.  There are still some gaps in the record, but I have
almost created a chain of evidence that--decade by decade--traces ferrets
in the USA back to just before the Revolutionary War.  As soon as I can
fill in those few, but extremely important gaps and make the timeline
continuous, I will publish it and end the California Fish and Game's
disingenuous remarks suggesting ferrets in the USA only date back to the
late 1880s.
[Posted in FML issue 4732]