Q: "I'm confused....I heard you in Atlanta say ferrets were not domesticated in Egypt, yet several notible ferret experts say they were. Are you saying they are wrong?" A: Whaaaalll, let's just say they were mistaken. Science really never proves anything directly; it actually only DISPROVES things. This is a process called "falsification," and it is what you do to ideas (or hypotheses). If you can falsify an idea, then the idea cannot be correct. However, if you cannot falsify an idea, it DOESN'T necessarily mean the idea is correct, all it means is that it hasn't been disproved. The way you disprove an idea is with the type of evidence that can be replicated (repeated) or tested. The more evidence you have, the better, especially if that evidence comes from different types of investigations. For example, humans evolved in Africa, but sometime or another migrated out to populate most of the world. The timing of that event has been tested using genetic changes in humans and dating archaeological artifacts, coming up with humans leaving Africa about 60-80 thousand years ago. Recent work studying changes in head and body lice have supported that date. Human head lice live on human hair, but body lice lives in clothing, and genetic studies indicate body lice evolved from head lice. The obvious implication is that body lice evolved from head lice during the time humans first started wearing clothing. The molecular clock dating that change suggests it took place about 75,000 years ago, neatly fitting in with the other times. A fourth piece of evidence is the oldest sewing needles date from that period. A fifth piece of evidence is that there are no modern human skeletons in Europe before that time. There is more supporting evidence, but you get the idea that the more INDEPENDENT evidence, the stronger the argument. The same is true about ferret domestication. For ferrets to have been domesticated in Egypt, the polecat had to be there. It wasn't and polecats are not adapted to the environment of north Africa. For ferrets to have been domesticated in Egypt, there had to be a reason for the domestication. The Egyptians already had cats, and there were no European rabbits. For ferrets to have been domesticated in Egypt, skeletons have to be there. They aren't, which says a lot for a culture that mummified virtually every animal in their domain. For ferrets to have been domesticated in Egypt, there should be hieroglyphs, words in the language, something, ANYTHING to support the idea. There is nada, zero, zip, nothing. On the other hand, the evidence supporting a southern European domestication about 4500 BC is substantial. Polecats have lived there for hundreds of thousands of years, ferrets are adapted to the environment, domesticated polecats were mentioned in early Greek writing, words for "ferret" exist in multiple languages, they have been domesticated long enough for a separate word to be invented to describe the domesticated state of the animal, genetic studies tie the ferret to the European polecat, and much, much more. But that doesn't mean the people who thought the ferret was domesticated in Egypt are wrong. People, just like scientists, base their beliefs of the best possible evidence, and for generations the idea that ferrets were domesticated in Egypt had plausibility. Since then, it has been realized the Biblical mention was a mistranslation, the hieroglyphic evidence depicted mongooses, and zooarchaeologists cannot find a single tooth or bone. All it means is that they were mistaken; the idea was tested and it didn't stand up to scrutiny. Think of it this way. It has been claimed that Thomas Edison performed 10,000 experiments before he successfully produced the light bulb. When he was asked about his 10,000 mistakes before he got it right, Edison said he didn't make 10,000 mistakes, but that the success took 10,001 steps to completion. And as far as I am concerned, he was correct; he wasn't wrong so much as he was discovering things that didn't work. Originally, no one had a clue to where ferrets were domesticated. Then it was thought they were domesticated in Egypt. I have suggested it was across a wide area of southern Europe. Tomorrow? Who knows? Maybe better evidence will show a specific locality. Will that make me wrong? No, all it would mean is we've taken another step towards the truth. Bob C [Posted in FML issue 4381]