Greg Jenner's Blog, page 2

MY NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT! The History of Celebrity

Greetings! Depending on how you felt about my first book, I come bearing good/terrible news. Yes, the fine people at Weidenfeld & Nicolson have commissioned me to write a second history book, and this one is all about…

*drum roll*

…The history of celebrity!

Yes, given the huge pervasiveness of celebrity culture in the modern world, I’m thrilled to be charting the early evolution of fame, from Classical gladiators to the coming of the Hollywood Golden Age in the 1920s. I won’t be focusing on Elvis, The Beatles and the sadly departed David Bowie ~  let’s be honest, you’ve heard all those stories already ~ but instead I’ll be tracking the history of celebrity as far back as 2,500 years ago to present a varied cast of compelling former stars who died before the 20th Century pop culture machine roared into deafening life.

Some celebs you’ll know, their reputations having doggedly endured beyond their lifespans, and others will be surprising stories of fleeting glory. I’ll be looking at heroes, villains, talented geniuses, provocateurs, fashionistas, hucksters with a flair for good PR, celebrity animals, and even people who should have been famous but weren’t.

With this history of celebrity divided into three acts – how fame was won, how it was maintained, and how it was lost – I’ll also be exploring the mechanics of the burgeoning fame industry: what role did the media play in promoting and killing careers? How did the public respond to celebs? What were the PR stunts, merchandising deals, and promotional techniques that kept celebrities in the limelight? Did they ever backfire horribly? How did some celebs remain famous even after their death? Did being a celebrity mean surrendering one’s privacy? And what happened if, instead of glamorous fame, dreaded notoriety struck instead?

Along the way, we’ll hear some astonishing tales, and will tackle some of the bigger questions that still dog us today: why do we have celebrities in the first place? And are they a force for good or evil in society?

I’ll be working on this book for the next two years, and will try to share updates as I go. If you’d like to suggest a lesser-known historical celeb deserving of my attention, I’d be delighted to talk to you about them. All useful advice will, of course, be formally acknowledged in my book’s ‘With Thanks To’ section.

Above all, I’m very excited to be working on this fascinating subject, and I really hope that you’ll be interested in reading my book when it’s published!

Anyway, I’d better go read about some dead celebs.

Thanks,

Greg

 

The post MY NEW BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT! The History of Celebrity appeared first on Greg Jenner.

A MILLION YEARS IN A DAY: COMING TO AMERICA, JUNE 2016

THE BRITISH ARE COMING! THE BRITISH ARE COMING!

Well, ok, it’s just me. And I’m actually half-French…

But anyway, it gives me enormous pleasure to announce that A MILLION YEARS IN A DAY will be published in the USA on the 21st June 2016 by Thomas Dunne Books!

To pre-order your copy of the newly updated book, choose from one of these stores below and hit the button. I really hope you enjoy the book!

Thanks so much,

Greg

AMAZON USA
BARNES & NOBLE
INDIE BOUND
APPLE
BOOKS-A-MILLION

 

The post A MILLION YEARS IN A DAY: COMING TO AMERICA, JUNE 2016 appeared first on Greg Jenner.

How Did Women In The Past Deal With Their Periods? The History of Menstruation

Hello! Right, let’s do the caveats first off. The history of periods is a subject exclusively about women’s experience, and I am a man. If this pisses you off, that’s totally fine. But what I will say is that I’m a historian interested in the lives of all 108 billion people who have ever lived, and half of those people were female. For too long women’s history has been relegated to minor sub-interest, and that’s a poor state of affairs.

So, why blog about the history of periods, and not something else?

As the Chief Nerd to CBBC’s Horrible Histories, I spend quite a lot of my time answering people’s questions about daily life in the past (It became so frequent, I decided to write a book about it – CLICK THE COVERS TO READ SOME REVIEWS).

Often these queries slip out from mouths that are already contorted by wrinkle-nosed disgust, and I’ll see my interrogator pre-emptively braced for gruesome tales of toilets, unwashed bodies, and rotten teeth festering in diseased gums. For many of us, the past is synonymous with ghastliness, and that’s part of its disgusting allure. But there is a particular question that only gets asked by women, and it’s usually delivered in a hushed, wincing tone: “how did women use to deal with their periods in the past?”

The fact that this question comes up so often at my public talks suggests to me that this is a subject deserving of wider attention. So, while I’m certainly no expert, I’ve had a go at briefly summarising some of the more obvious elements in the history of menstruation.

WERE WOMEN’S PERIODS REGULAR?

Firstly, it’s worth noting that a regular cycle might not have always been so common. In the pre-Antibiotic Age, when nourishing food could be scarce and workplace Health & Safety didn’t exist, many women were likely to suffer from vitamin deficiency, disease, or bodily exhaustion. As is still the case, such stressors could interrupt the body’s hormonal balance and delay or accelerate the arrival of menses. Aware of this, medical writers dedicated much effort to discussing menstrual abnormalities, and in 1671 a midwife called Jane Sharp noted that periods: “sometimes flow too soon, sometimes too late, they are too many or too few, or are quite stopt that they flow not at all. Sometimes they flow by drops, and again sometimes they overflow; sometimes they cause pain, sometimes they are of an evil colour and not according to nature; sometimes they are voided not by the womb but some other way; sometimes strange things are sent forth from the womb.”

But despite the dangers of disease and diet, women have always had periods: so how did they cope? Let’s go back to the time of the Greeks and Romans.

DID THE ROMANS USE TAMPONS?

The point often made in online blogs is that, even in the ancient world, women were using what may seem similar to modern hygiene products. The Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates of Kos, who is known as the Father of Medicine, is widely referenced on the internet as mentioning that small wooden sticks, wrapped with soft lint, might be inserted into the vagina as a primitive tampon. This is a claim that doesn’t stack up, as shown here by Dr Helen King. It’s also been suggested that Egyptian women used a tampon of papyrus fibres, while Roman women perhaps preferred a similar device woven from softer cotton. Frustratingly, these are theories founded in modern supposition rather than good evidence. Not to say it didn’t happen, but we can’t prove it. Thankfully, there’s better proof for the widespread use of absorbent cotton pads that lined a Roman woman’s linen knickers (subligaculum). For more on that, check out this other post by Dr Helen King.

Such “menstruous rags”, as they are called in the Bible (in 1600s England they were called “clouts”) continued in use for millennia, despite the fact that most Western women wandered about knickerless between the medieval era and the early 1800s, with the only exceptions having been the fashionable ladies of 16th century Italy. If women really did spend a thousand years going commando, then an alternative method was to suspend such pads between their legs using a belted girdle around the waist. We know, for example, that Queen Elizabeth I of England owned three black silk girdles to keep her linen sanitary towels, or “vallopes of Holland cloth”, held in the right place.

RELIGIOUS ATTITUDES TO MENSTRUAL BLOOD

Queen Lizzie also famously took a bath once a month “whether she needed it or not”, and this was likely at the end of her flow. Such intimate hygiene may now strike us as purely practical, but there was an ancient spiritual significance to such things. In Judaism’s Halakha laws, as soon as a woman begins bleeding she enters into the profane state of Niddah and is not allowed to touch her husband until she has slept on white sheets for a week, to prove the bloodshed is over. Only when the fibres are verifiably unstained can she then wash herself in the sacred Mikvah bath and return to the marital bed. Similarly, Islamic tradition also dictates that a woman must have conducted her post-menstrual ritual ablutions before she can make love to her husband. What’s more, during her period a Muslim woman is not allowed inside a Mosque, and cannot pray or fast during Ramadan.

Such menstrual ‘impurity’ is also visible in ancient medical beliefs, though in Ancient Egypt period blood could be used positively as a medical ingredient. For example, a cure for sagging breasts was to smear it over the drooping mammaries and thighs, perhaps because the womb was the incubator of new life and so its blood possessed rejuvenating powers? However, the Greek physician Hippocrates – though, himself, a man with many curious medical remedies – instead believed menstruation to be potentially dangerous to a woman’s health.

MEDICINE AND SUPERSTITION

During the glorious height of Greek civilisation, about 2,500 years ago, it was widely-believed that periods began when a girl reached 14, but if the process was delayed then the excess blood slowly gathered around her heart, producing symptoms of fever, erratic behaviour, violent swearing, and even suicidal depression (later in the 19th century this became known as hysteria, after the Greek name for womb, hystera). If the girl’s period refused to flow in good time, then Hippocrates had no qualms in bleeding her from the veins, as he had no understanding of the womb’s lining being shed. To him, all blood was the same. Bizarrely, this intervention was thought essential; otherwise medical theory suggested her womb would wander aimlessly around her body!

Other ancient scholars repeated even stranger beliefs. Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist who died rushed headlong towards Mt. Vesuvius’ famous eruption of 79AD, warned that contact with menstrual blood: “turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens dry up, the fruit falls off tress, steel edges blunt and the gleam of ivory is dulled, bees die in their hives, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.” Such superstitious attitudes clung on through the ages, and reinforced the medieval Church’s suspicion towards women.

Though it was Adam who tasted the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, Catholic doctrine argued Eve was to blame for humanity’s eviction from blissful Eden. In divine retribution, it was said by Hildegard of Bingen that Eve’s female descendants would endure painful childbirth, and therefore the monthly cramps of menstruation. Given Pliny’s dire warnings of bloody peril, coupled with the Church’s institutional misogyny, it’s unsurprising that medieval European women were therefore believed to temporarily possess supernatural powers of evil during their monthly visits from Mother Nature.

These outlandish scare-stories could be truly bizarre.  Not only would beehives allegedly empty, swords rust, and fresh fruit rot in their presence, but nearby men could be cursed with just a glance, and a drop of blood on the penis could allegedly burn the sensitive flesh like it were caustic acid. If a bloke were brave enough, or horny enough, to penetrate a woman during her period then it was claimed the resulting baby would be weak, deformed, and ginger (sorry, redheads…) What’s more, the risk didn’t dampen with age – pre-menopausal women were believed to have stored up a lifetime of excess blood (in line with Hippocrates’ theories) and this meant the poisonous vapours might escape through their eyes and nose, and contaminate – or even kill – babies and animals in their vicinity.

DID WOMEN TRY TO HIDE THEIR PERIODS?

With a certain amount of shame attached to menstruation as a process, and genuine horror affixed to the blood itself, it’s no surprise that women took pains to mask their cycles from public view. In medieval Europe they carried nosegays of sweet-smelling herbs around their necks and waists, hoping it would neutralise the odour of blood, and they might try to stem a heavy flow with such medicines as powdered toad. However, pain relief was not readily permitted by the Church: God apparently wanted each cramp to be a reminder of Eve’s Original Sin. The fact that nuns – who were often fasting, or on drastically reduced diets – suffered such iron deficiency as to completely suppress their cycle merely highlighted to medieval thinkers how concerted holiness could, at least to their understanding, reverse Eve’s error and bring a woman’s body back into divine grace.

WHAT IF A WOMAN STOPPED HAVING REGULAR PERIODS?

If an ordinary woman stopped having periods then this was considered bad news: firstly, procreation was an important religious and social duty. Secondly, as dictated by Hippocrates, an infertile wife was also more likely suffer a build-up of maddening blood that might tip her toward fevers, fits and – shock, horror! – manly behaviour. Thankfully, the best advice was simply to have regular sex and eat healthily. If that didn’t work, gentler remedies included potions of herbs and wine, or vaginal pessaries made up of mashed fruits and vegetables. The barber’s knife was wisely the last resort.

DID WOMEN IN THE PAST WEAR SANITARY PADS?

Assuming that women were healthy, it’s possibly quite shocking that not all our female ancestors seemed to have used pads, tampons, cups or other devices to catch the blood. Indeed, many simply bled into their clothes, while others are said to have dripped droplets of blood as they walked, leaving a trail behind them. But, given what we known about Edwardian attitudes to hygiene and decency, it’s perhaps not surprising that it was during this period that more modern solutions began to appear.

For starters, an elegant Edwardian lady hoping to avoid unsightly staining might well have worn a Menstrual Apron under her skirts – this was a washable linen nappy for the genitals, held in place by a girdle and joined at the rear by a protective rubber skirt. To ensure warmth and decency (if a sudden gust of wind lifted up her skirts) ankle-length knickers were also worn beneath the apparatus, but they would be special open-crotch pantalettes so no blood would stain them. But gradually these cumbersome contraptions were phased out as a new twist on an ancient technology began to emerge.

THE HISTORY OF TAMPONS

The modern sanitary hygiene business properly began when a company called Cellucotton discovered its wood fibre field bandages were being used for non-military purposes during WW1. Field nurses looking after injured soldiers had been stuffing the bandages down their pants during their periods, and found them to be surprisingly effective. Cellucotton got wind of this and decided to market the pads as Kotex, using advertising campaigns that highlighted the comfort and relief given by their reliable product. When Kotex pads flew off the shelves, Cellucotton figured it was onto a winner and changed its name to mirror their miracle product.

Though we suspect the Ancient Egyptian and Romans were the first to use tampons, it wasn’t until 1929 that an American osteopath called Dr Earle Haas re-invented this product. His ‘applicated tampon’ allowed the user to slide the absorbent diaphragm into her vagina without having to touch her genitals, so it was more hygienic. It was clearly a good idea but, after struggling to market them himself, in 1933 Haas sold the patent to an industrious German immigrant called Gertrude Tendrich who started making the tampons by hand with little more than a sewing machine and an air compressor.

From those humble beginnings, hunched over a sewing machine while individually crafting each tampon by hand, Tendrich’s company flourished. Today, it accounts for half of all tampon sales worldwide, and was bought by Proctor and Gamble in 1997 for $2 billion. Tampax is now a global brand.

Check out the online Museum of Menstruation for more images and info. If you want much more detail on menstruation in 16th and 17th centuries, here’s a very readable academic article by Sara Read

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS BLOG, YOU MIGHT LIKE MY BOOK: IT’S A FUNNY HISTORY OF HOW DAILY LIFE SINCE THE STONE AGE. CLICK THE IMAGE TO READ SOME REVIEWS.

The post How Did Women In The Past Deal With Their Periods? The History of Menstruation appeared first on Greg Jenner.

How Did Women Deal With Their Periods? The History of Menstruation

Hello! Right, let’s do the caveats first off. The history of menstruation is a subject exclusively about women’s experience, and I am a man. If this pisses you off, that’s fine. But what I will say is that I’m a historian interested in the lives of all 108 billion people who have ever lived, and half of those people were female. For too long women’s history has been relegated to minor sub-interest, and that’s a poor state of affairs.

So, why blog about the history of menstruation, and not something else?

As the Chief Nerd to CBBC’s Horrible Histories, I spend quite a lot of my time answering people’s questions about daily life in the past (*SHAMELESS BOOK PLUG KLAXON!* It became so frequent, I decided to write a book about it). Often these queries slip out from mouths that are already contorted by wrinkle-nosed disgust, and I’ll see my interrogator pre-emptively braced for gruesome tales of toilets, unwashed bodies, and rotten teeth festering in diseased gums. For many of us, the past is synonymous with ghastliness, and that’s part of its disgusting allure. But there is a particular question that only gets asked by women, and it’s usually delivered in a hushed, wincing tone: “how did women deal with their periods?”

The fact that this question comes up so often at my public talks suggests to me that this is a subject deserving of wider attention. So, while I’m certainly no expert, I’ve had a go at briefly summarising some of the more obvious elements in the story of how women dealt with their menstruation.

Firstly, it’s worth noting that a regular cycle might not have always been so common. In the pre-Antibiotic Age, when nourishing food could be scarce and workplace Health & Safety didn’t exist, many women were likely to suffer from vitamin deficiency, disease, or bodily exhaustion. As is still the case, such stressors could interrupt the body’s hormonal balance and delay or accelerate the arrival of menses. Aware of this, medical writers dedicated much effort to discussing menstrual abnormalities, and in 1671 a midwife called Jane Sharp noted that periods: “sometimes flow too soon, sometimes too late, they are too many or too few, or are quite stopt that they flow not at all. Sometimes they flow by drops, and again sometimes they overflow; sometimes they cause pain, sometimes they are of an evil colour and not according to nature; sometimes they are voided not by the womb but some other way; sometimes strange things are sent forth from the womb.”

But despite the dangers of disease and diet, women have always had periods: so how did they cope?

Well, the evidence suggests that even in the ancient world, women were using what may seem similar to modern hygiene products. The Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates of Kos, who is known as the Father of Medicine, is widely referenced on the internet as mentioning that small wooden sticks, wrapped with soft lint, might be inserted into the vagina as a primitive tampon. This is a claim that doesn’t stack up, as shown here by Dr Helen King. It’s also been suggested that Egyptian women used a tampon of papyrus fibres, while Roman women perhaps preferred a similar device woven from softer cotton. Frustratingly, these are theories founded in modern supposition rather than good evidence, but there’s better proof for the widespread use of absorbent cotton pads that lined a Roman woman’s linen knickers (subligaculum). For more on that, check out this other post by Dr Helen King.

Such “menstruous rags”, as they are called in the Bible (in 1600s England they were called “clouts”) continued in use for millennia, despite the fact that most Western women wandered about knickerless between the medieval era and the early 1800s, with the only exceptions having been the fashionable ladies of 16th century Italy. If women really did spend a thousand years going commando, then an alternative method was to suspend such pads between their legs using a belted girdle around the waist. We know, for example, that Queen Elizabeth I of England owned three black silk girdles to keep her linen sanitary towels, or “vallopes of Holland cloth”, held in the right place.

Queen Lizzie also famously took a bath once a month “whether she needed it or not”, and this was likely at the end of her flow. Such intimate hygiene may now strike us as purely practical, but there was an ancient spiritual significance to such things. In Judaism’s Halakha laws, as soon as a woman begins bleeding she enters into the profane state of Niddah and is not allowed to touch her husband until she has slept on white sheets for a week, to prove the bloodshed is over. Only when the fibres are verifiably unstained can she then wash herself in the sacred Mikvah bath and return to the marital bed. Similarly, Islamic tradition also dictates that a woman must have conducted her post-menstrual ritual ablutions before she can make love to her husband. What’s more, during her period a Muslim woman is not allowed inside a Mosque, and cannot pray or fast during Ramadan.

Such menstrual ‘impurity’ is also visible in ancient medical beliefs, though in Ancient Egypt period blood could be used positively as a medical ingredient. For example, a cure for sagging breasts was to smear it over the drooping mammaries and thighs, perhaps because the womb was the incubator of new life and so its blood possessed rejuvenating powers? However, the Greek physician Hippocrates – though, himself, a man with many curious medical remedies – instead believed menstruation to be potentially dangerous to a woman’s health.

During the glorious height of Greek civilisation, about 2,500 years ago, it was widely-believed that menarche began when a girl reached 14, but if the process was delayed then the excess blood slowly gathered around her heart, producing symptoms of fever, erratic behaviour, violent swearing, and even suicidal depression (later in the 19th century this became known as hysteria, after the Greek name for womb, hystera). If the girl’s period refused to flow in good time then Hippocrates had no qualms in bleeding her from the veins, as he had no understanding of the womb’s lining being shed. To him, all blood was the same. Bizarrely, this intervention was thought essential; otherwise medical theory suggested her womb would wander aimlessly around her body!

Other ancient scholars repeated even stranger beliefs. Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist who died rushed headlong towards Mt. Vesuvius’ famous eruption of 79AD, warned that contact with menstrual blood: “turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens dry up, the fruit falls off tress, steel edges blunt and the gleam of ivory is dulled, bees die in their hives, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.” Such superstitious attitudes clung on through the ages, and reinforced the medieval Church’s suspicion towards women.

Though it was Adam who tasted the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, Catholic doctrine argued Eve was to blame for humanity’s eviction from blissful Eden. In divine retribution, it was said by Hildegard of Bingen that Eve’s female descendants would endure painful childbirth, and therefore the monthly cramps of menstruation. Given Pliny’s dire warnings of bloody peril, coupled with the Church’s institutional misogyny, it’s unsurprising that medieval European women were therefore believed to temporarily possess supernatural powers of evil during their monthly visits from Mother Nature.

These outlandish scare-stories could be truly bizarre.  Not only would beehives allegedly empty, swords rust, and fresh fruit rot in their presence, but nearby men could be cursed with just a glance, and a drop of blood on the penis could allegedly burn the sensitive flesh like it were caustic acid. If a bloke were brave enough, or horny enough, to penetrate a woman during her period then it was claimed the resulting baby would be weak, deformed, and ginger (sorry, redheads…) What’s more, the risk didn’t dampen with age – pre-menopausal women were believed to have stored up a lifetime of excess blood (in line with Hippocrates’ theories) and this meant the poisonous vapours might escape through their eyes and nose, and contaminate – or even kill – babies and animals in their vicinity.

With a certain amount of shame attached to menstruation as a process, and genuine horror affixed to the blood itself, it’s no surprise that women took pains to mask their cycles from public view. In medieval Europe they carried nosegays of sweet-smelling herbs around their necks and waists, hoping it would neutralise the odour of blood, and they might try to stem a heavy flow with such medicines as powdered toad. However, pain relief was not readily permitted by the Church: God apparently wanted each cramp to be a reminder of Eve’s Original Sin. The fact that nuns – who were often fasting, or on drastically reduced diets – suffered such iron deficiency as to completely suppress their cycle merely highlighted to medieval thinkers how concerted holiness could, at least to their understanding, reverse Eve’s error and bring a woman’s body back into divine grace.

That said, if an ordinary woman stopped having periods then this was considered bad news: firstly, procreation was an important religious and social duty. Secondly, as dictated by Hippocrates, an infertile wife was also more likely suffer a build-up of maddening blood that might tip her toward fevers, fits and – shock, horror! – manly behaviour. Thankfully, the best advice was simply to have regular sex and eat healthily. If that didn’t work, gentler remedies included potions of herbs and wine, or vaginal pessaries made up of mashed fruits and vegetables. The barber’s knife was wisely the last resort.

Assuming that women were healthy, it’s possibly quite shocking that not all our female ancestors seemed to have used pads, tampons, cups or other devices to catch the blood. Indeed, many simply bled into their clothes, while others are said to have dripped droplets of blood as they walked, leaving a trail behind them. But, given what we known about Edwardian attitudes to hygiene and decency, it’s perhaps not surprising that it was during this period that more modern solutions began to appear.

For starters, an elegant Edwardian lady hoping to avoid unsightly staining might well have worn a Menstrual Apron under her skirts – this was a washable linen nappy for the genitals, held in place by a girdle and joined at the rear by a protective rubber skirt. To ensure warmth and decency (if a sudden gust of wind lifted up her skirts) ankle-length knickers were also worn beneath the apparatus, but they would be special open-crotch pantalettes so no blood would stain them. But gradually these cumbersome contraptions were phased out as a new twist on an ancient technology began to emerge.

The modern sanitary hygiene business properly began when a company called Cellucotton discovered its wood fibre field bandages were being used for non-military purposes during WW1. Field nurses looking after injured soldiers had been stuffing the bandages down their pants during their periods, and found them to be surprisingly effective. Cellucotton got wind of this and decided to market the pads as Kotex, using advertising campaigns that highlighted the comfort and relief given by their reliable product. When Kotex pads flew off the shelves, Cellucotton figured it was onto a winner and changed its name to mirror their miracle product.

Though we suspect the Ancient Egyptian and Romans were the first to use tampons, it wasn’t until 1929 that an American osteopath called Dr Earle Haas re-invented this product. His ‘applicated tampon’ allowed the user to slide the absorbent diaphragm into her vagina without having to touch her genitals, so it was more hygienic. It was clearly a good idea but, after struggling to market them himself, in 1933 Haas sold the patent to an industrious German immigrant called Gertrude Tendrich who started making the tampons by hand with little more than a sewing machine and an air compressor.

From those humble beginnings, hunched over a sewing machine while individually crafting each tampon by hand, Tendrich’s company flourished. Today, it accounts for half of all tampon sales worldwide, and was bought by Proctor and Gamble in 1997 for $2 billion. Tampax is now a global brand.

Check out the online Museum of Menstruation for more images and info. If you want much more detail on menstruation in 16th and 17th centuries, here’s a very readable academic article by Sara Read

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE MY BOOK – CLICK HERE FOR FREE CLIPS FROM THE AUDIOBOOK VERSION.

The post How Did Women Deal With Their Periods? The History of Menstruation appeared first on Greg Jenner.

Who Was Worse – Henry VIII or Ivan the Terrible?

This recent survey by the Historical Writers Association has declared Henry VIII the “worst monarch in history”. I, like many historians on Twitter, find this a fairly ridiculous thing to state – not least because what is being measured when we say “worst”? Is it a moral question, or one of political success? And is Henry really the epitome of awful in the entirety of human history? I think you’d be hard pressed to find any historian who can make that claim stand up.

But it did remind me that, a few years back, I had quickly scribbled a song for Horrible Histories series 3. It was never used, not least because I was never asked to write it by my producer (I did it mainly for the fun of it), but I think now might be a good time to dust it off. The point of the song was to illustrate that our own inward obsession with national history means we can quite often ignore what was happening elsewhere at the same time. And so, rather fittingly, I present you my very silly song about who was the Crueller Ruler? Henry VIII or Russia’s famed Tsar, Ivan the Terrible.

I think you guess my feelings on the matter…

 

HENRY VIII versus IVAN THE TERRIBLE Song

V/O:

Please welcome to the stage, King Henry VIII.

GRAMS: BALLADIC MUSIC

HENRY VIII (warbling sincerely):

I’m Henry the Eighth, the terrible Tudor,

 Of all the kings, I was the meanest ruler,

 In Tudor times, you could not be crueller!

ENTER: IVAN THE TERRIBLE, suddenly smashing his way through a wall

GRAMS: abruptly stops as the needle scratches across the record

 IVAN THE TERRIBLE (Russian accent)

The fat man lies! Everyone knows I was the cruellest ruler from the 1500s!

 HENRY VIII  (shouting off-screen)

Security? There’s a strange foreign tramp on my stage…

 IVAN THE TERRIBLE

I am no tramp! I am Ivan the Terrible, Tsar of Russia…and I was far crueller!

 HENRY VIII  (annoyed)

Oh yeah?

 IVAN THE TERRIBLE

Yeah!

 HENRY VIII  (annoyed)

We’ll see about that! (to off-screen) Hit it!

 GRAMS: High tempo showtune, a la ‘Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better’

 HENRY:

I’m Henry the Eighth,

I’m the baddest king in town,

No-one gets to diss me,

Not unless you are my clown,

His name is Will Summers,

I let him give me cheek,

But no-one else can mock me,

Or they’re dead within the week!

IVAN THE TERRIBLE:     

I too once had a jester,

Who acted very dumb,

He loved to pull his pants down,

And show us all his…rear,

But often I got angry,

Ripped my hair out from the strife, (He rips a clump of hair out)

One day I chucked my soup at him,

Then stabbed him with a knife!

 CHORUS

 IVAN:         I was the cruellest, the mightiest bully!

HENRY:       What about me? I disagree with you fully!

BOTH:         At least we can both agree on one thing,

                     It was dangerous to live when we were both king!

HENRY VIII:                     

My courtiers were terrified,

I loved a bit of gore,

I chopped Bishop Fisher,

And my friend Sir Thomas More!

IVAN THE TERRIBLE:

Dull old beheading?

Where’s the fun in that?

I dropped cats and dogs from towers,

And watched them all go splat!

CHORUS

HENRY:        I was the meanest, made people so scare-able!

IVAN: Did you not hear my name? I’m Ivan the TERRIBLE!

BOTH:          At least we can both agree on one thing,

It was dangerous to live when we were both king!

HENRY VIII:                     

70,000 people,

Executed in my reign!

IVAN THE TERRIBLE:     

I destroyed Kazan city,

Killing more in a day!

HENRY VIII:                     

I married six women,

Executed two wives!

IVAN THE TERRIBLE:     

Well, I married eight,

And personally murdered five!

GRAMS: The music stops abruptly again

HENRY VIII  (surprised)

Really?

IVAN THE TERRIBLE (quickly)

Yes – Poisoned, poisoned, poisoned, divorced, murdered, buried alive, drowned…and survived!

HENRY VIII  (jealous)

At least mine’s easier to remember…

GRAMS: Music kicks back in

CHORUS

IVAN:           I was a monster, a figure of hate!

HENRY:        But I’m much more famous, I’m Henry number Eight!

BOTH:          At least we can both agree on one thing,

                      It was dangerous to live when we were both king!

IVAN THE TERRIBLE:      

Impaled and roasted peasants,

And I even killed my son!

HENRY VIII  (impressed):

I thought I was cruellest,

But now I know you’ve won!

IVAN THE TERRIBLE:      

I boiled my chief minister,

Burned a Prince at the stake,

Tied kids to heavy sleighs,

And threw them in a lake,

HENRY VIII  (impressed):

That is terrible!

IVAN THE TERRIBLE:

Not done yet…

But I was cruellest of all,

To the Archbishop of Novgorod,

Had him sewn into a bearskin,

Then eaten by wild dogs!

CHORUS

HENRY:        Ivan the Terrible was violently mad!

IVAN:           But Henry the Eighth was still pretty bad

BOTH:          At least we can both agree on one thing,

                      It was dangerous to live when we were both king!

END

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Greg’s Top Writing Tips

I was recently asked in this interview to give my top writing tips for budding bloggers and history writers. I don’t profess to know anything at all, and there are much better people to ask, but, based on the fact I’ve read thousands of books, I thought I’d have a crack at a vaguely amusing list of rules. Hope they help!

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WRITING TIPS!

Don’t patronise your readers, but don’t assume they know as much as you. Language is beautiful in its variety; it is a bubbling cauldron of syllabic possibilities, so dip your ladle and scoop out tasty synonyms for oft-used words. But don’t tumble into esoteric pretension – only Will Self can get away with sentences that resemble a choking thesaurus being given the Heimlich manoeuvre.

And while we’re on the subject, don’t vomit tautology over every sentence when one adjective will do. And feel free to start sentences with conjunctions, because that’s the kind of kickass maverick you are. Read George Orwell. Feel free to ignore his Six Rules of Writing, so long as you know why your version is better.

Use metaphorical language, analogy, and simile – compose an image that floods the mind like a rolling tsunami of vivid meaning – but do so sparingly, for repetition can be dull. Avoid clichés like the plague, because at the end of the day, when all is said and done, and the clock strikes noon, and the chickens have all come home to roost (having been counted before they hatched), it turns out that all that glitters is not gold. But an oldie can be a goodie. So, yeah, whatever…

Subvert language. Have funs with puns, and don’t be scared to MEsS AboUt with tHe RULeS. Vary your pace. Short, sharp sentences can be impactful.

See?

Long sentences can be rather joyful in their elastic span, particularly if you are building an idea that suggests timelessness, or vastness, or incomprehension at something that seems too great to take in; or even if you want to build momentum towards some higher plateau, or some dreadful crescendo, and you wish to convey the excitement, or frosty terror, of the mounting tension as the revelation looms into view, and… OH MY GOD, WHAT IS THAT??????!!!

Listen to people chatting on the bus. Study dialogue and speech patterns. Steal everything from everyone, and hope they don’t notice. Be original. Get on Twitter and learn to be interesting in 140 characters or less. Decide if you are going to be militantly angry about the word ‘fewer’. Read voraciously, read everything – you can learn as much from crap writing as you can from literary genius. Enjoy your writing. Try and remember to eat lunch.

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The Surprising History of Your Morning Routine

One day in the future, when we are wizened and grey, we may look back on our lives and regale our great-grandkids with the Kodak moments that shone like beacons in our own personal biography – our nervous first kiss, our first passionate love affair, the excitement of passing the driving test, the joy of our wedding day, the terror and wonder at the birth of a child, and, most of all, the unbridled glee of that tax rebate.

But, actually, the majority of a human life is spent trotting through a repeating pattern of mundane routines and rituals; the stuff that gets us from day to day. When our grandkids ask us what we did with our lives, the more honest answer might: ‘I slept through a third of it, and the rest was mainly a succession of boring chores to keep me alive…’

Ever since we evolved as a species, 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens have had to contend with so many basic, banal necessities – washing our bodies, caring for our teeth, urinating, defecating, eating, drinking, sleeping, socialising with others, and communicating. These things are universal across time and geography, and as a social historian they are of utmost fascination to me, not least because the history of such ordinariness is actually astonishingly extraordinary.

In my book, A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life, From Stone Age To Phone Age, I have attempted to tell the story of how our ancestors coped with these daily routines, and how our lives compare to theirs. Researching the book was incredibly eye-opening, and there are facts in there that astounded me. Please allow me to share a few with you…

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL BLOG ON MY PUBLISHER’S WEBSITE.

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The Richard III Reburial: What Does It Say About Us?

So, the Richard III reburial, eh? Let’s be honest, who among us expected that the first televised funeral of a British monarch, that we would see in our lifetimes, would be that of a man who died five centuries ago? I’m pretty sure we all would have bet the house on our beloved nonagenarian Queen being afforded the honour. Indeed, yesterday’s funeral procession, leading up to the Richard III reburial, was unique for a number of reasons, not least because it culminated with a Catholic service in an Anglican cathedral, something which probably generated a lot of tension behind-the-scenes. The logic for this decision was obvious – when Richard was slaughtered in battle in 1485, there was no such thing as the Church of England, so he died a default Catholic. Fair enough.

But to say that the whole occasion was predetermined by the guidelines of ritual is, of course, utter nonsense. This was the oddest of invented traditions; though there were historical precedents to draw upon. After all, it was common practice in the Middle Ages for the bones of saints to be ceremonially transferred into expensive new shrines, in preparation for a flock of tourists. Both St Mark (from Alexandria to Venice) and Father Christmas himself, St Nicholas (from Myra to Bari) were celebrity imports, whose arrival legitimated the welcoming cathedrals and produced huge revenue from eager pilgrims seeking cures and benedictions.

But Richard III was a little different. He died in a watershed battle and was given a decent burial, though not one befitting a king. Though the ignominy of a modern car park flew in the face of ancestral royalty, his dramatic reinterment was entirely unnecessary for his spiritual salvation under Catholic doctrine. No, the reason he was transferred to Leicester Cathedral was because we felt it was the right thing to do. But why?

Well, actually, many people thought that was the wrong decision. They would have preferred York, arguing that this fell in line with his wishes. Unfortunately, we have no idea what he wanted, and those who say otherwise are attempting to mind-read a dessicated corpse. Others wondered if he deserved the state funeral of his usurper, with its glorious location at Westminster Abbey. This, at least, was better in keeping with the solemn traditions of old, but might have felt more like a buttress to our own opinions on the royals; a way of celebrating the principle of monarchy. “Kings belong in the hall of kings”, we might have muttered, and burying him in mere Leicester might have seemed like an insult to Queen Elizabeth herself.

The right decision was made, though. Richard will be buried not far from where he died. To have moved him beyond Leicester would have been to undermine the potency of his violent demise. Here was a man who tried to cling onto power by rushing headlong at his enemy, hoping to smash in his brains and render the invasion futile. The fact that Richard’s bravery backfired – and it was he who died rather than Henry Tudor – changed the course of history forever. The modern world hangs on that ill-fated charge across the field of Bosworth, and nothing reminds us of that significance more than having to traipse to the Midlands to see his tomb. This is not where Richard expected to end up, but history did not go as he had hoped…

In truth, if it were up to me, I would have perhaps put his body on display in a museum. Like a sacrificial ancient Celt, transformed into an eerie bog body, or a divine Pharaoh rendered mute by mummification, we could have been astonished and humbled when confronted with his ossified mortality. Generations of children could have gawped in macabre fascination at the arid, yellowing remains of a once mighty figure. To see the mortal remains of a great person reminds you that this towering figure from the history books had a body like you and me, and it no doubt ached and ailed like our own. We so easily leap towards romance myth, forgetting the human aspects of our ancestors. They too had headaches and suffered from piles.

Of course, there are many ethical reasons as to why displaying his bones might have been distasteful. Some would say all human remains should be reburied as standard; others might claim reburial should only apply to anyone with a known name (we’re less queasy with the anonymous dead); maybe others might state a body must be a certain age before it can shock us in museum cabinets – perhaps 200 years, enough to shove it comfortably out of living memory? When dealing with mortal remains, there are also cultural sensitivities to be aware of – in the USA and Australia, archaeologists are legally mandated to work closely with indigenous peoples, respecting the fact that ancestor worship is integral to the Aboriginal or Native American Indian worldview. A box of bones may have tremendous inalienable power to scientists – they could be career-defining data sets that prove a bold theory – but, for indigenous communities, those bones represent a human soul.

These are all interesting things to ponder. The crucial question is what moral responsibility we have to treat a body a certain way? Arguably, Richard III – with no direct descendants – belongs to us; he is a totem pole in our nation’s history. But does that render him less than human? Am I being crass to deploy him as an artefact when he was a living, thinking being? We have the right to decide how our body will be treated after death, but when does that elapse? In France, where my granddad is buried, we have to rent his grave – because he died about 25 years ago, the authorities now have the right to dig him up and sell his spot to another family if we don’t pay the upkeep costs.

If I’d have put Richard III on display, I wouldn’t have done it to freak people out. His discovery was a celebrity exclusive that wowed all the global news agencies, but the real triumph was the archaeology. Richard III’s bones were the archaeological discovery of the century, and the scientific techniques used to interpret them are astounding in their genius. Yet, his celebrity status as Shakespeare’s most villainous tyrant, and the cultural resonance that gave him, took most of the headlines. Those bones tell us so much, but they help us in no way to know whether he murdered the Princes in the Tower. And, yet, we’ve seen no end of debates on exactly this subject – it’s a very interesting intellectual exercise, but one with a bathetic collapse in the climax.

Yesterday’s funeral, then, was about us: about what we feel when we talk about the past, or the concept of death. It was a wish-fulfilment exercise for our own confused emotions about who we are as people, and where we originated. Indeed, one might argue the practise of doing history is little more than holding a mirror up to our own fascinations. Every generation rewrites history anew, to better fit in with its own perspective. And that, perhaps, is how we came to have the bizarre spectacle of a Victorian funeral cortege escorted by two armoured medieval knights, defending a modern oak coffin crafted by a modern Canadian, heading into a predominately Victorian era Anglican cathedral, to be welcomed by a medieval Catholic rite uttered in the modern English language.

And, as King Richard arrived in the cathedral, and was handed over to the Dean’s care by the lead archaeologist on the project, Richard Buckley, there occurred a magic trick in which the archaeological data transformed back into a man, through the moving religious service, and then into a myth, as the historians and tourists lining the streets began to speculate over his reign once more.  Farewell Richard, will we ever know your true self? I doubt it.

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Jeremy Clarkson: The Denim-Quilted Jester We Love To Hate

When I was a boy, in the hazy days of the early 90s, Jeremy Clarkson would appear on my telly, clad almost entirely in denim, leaning against mid-range Nissan saloons and talking about clutches. This was a worthy purpose, I surmised. At that age, like many boys, I found the pantheon of differing cars on the road something worthy of careful notation and categorisation –  I knew all the badges and headlight configurations, and remember excitedly surveying a family friend’s new Mondeo. “Ooooh, such exoticism! A car that was quite literally worldly,” I thought to myself.  Yes, cars were exciting and anything that told me more about cars was therefore much coveted. Top Trumps was not just a game to pass the time, but a secular bible for useless automotive statistics. I knew all about valves and BHP, long before I even knew what either of those things actually meant. Yet, puzzlingly, the man who could impart all this information to me – Top Gear’s curly-haired Adonis – was extraordinarily dull. To my 11 year old brain, his vocal output was a stream of Doncaster-inflected white noise. I had no time for the man, and within a couple of years I had discovered guitars and became completely uninterested in cars.

Yet somehow, somewhere along the line, Clarkson became a brand.  I’m not sure how, I was probably too busy learning powerchords to notice.  Needless to say, by my mid-twenties I was one of millions of people who, having wondered off for a decade or so, discovered that Top Gear (Mark II) had become must-watch TV.  There was banter, and super cars, and celebrities swearing, and the accidental-on-purpose bit where James May got lost and Clarkson set fire to a primary school. Oh, such jinks! But more than that, it was funny. Properly funny.  Messers May, Clarkson and Hammond had forged a gleefully puerile bond, built around a rose-tinted longing for childhood japes and the glory days of Empire, when men had ‘taches and everyone hated the French. The cars were largely incidental macguffins; shiny, noisy props that permitted the lads to muck about in a variety of locations.  Yes, they loved cars, but the audience wasn’t particularly bothered.  Top Gear could quite easily have been about tractors, and we’d all still have tuned in, provided, at some point, that Clarkson tried to catapult one over a Belgian waffle shop. No, cars were not the draw at all. It was the man, and his accomplices, we tuned in for.

For many decent people, it’s all a bit of fun. Clarkson is a blokey, no nonsense chap you’d happily meet in a pub. In times of increased sensitivity in what you can say and do (rightly so, in most cases), he’s an old-fashioned champion of casual, spiteless obnoxiousness. So, his broad popularity is unsurprising. The thing that is harder to grasp is why quite a lot of the people who watched Top Gear, and enjoyed it immensely, also think Clarkson is a bit of a cock.

What’s going on there, then?

Perhaps, then, it’s useful to see Clarkson as a pressure valve? He is the 18th century pantomime, brimming with political satire, slurs against the church, jokes about bums and references to sexual naughtiness.  Like the Harlequin, he dons his special comedy disguise, the denim suit, to romp about before nervous audiences, poking us with his rightwing jibes. He delights in making us grin like idiots, then watching as we suck in breath through immediate ashamed remorse. “Ha!”, he says, “Made you laugh!” We are goaded by this buffoon, this jester in the curly wig, into briefly surrendering our modern, politically correct values – if only for a few moments.  Lazy Mexicans, dour Germans, fat Americans, female drivers… Clarkson panders to the fact that we love thumping huge red buttons that say ‘Do Not Touch’.  While some Guardian readers may be immune to his withering fire, he regularly made me laugh… and then tut.

In particular, Clarkson would have appealed to Francois Rabelais, the humanist scholar of 16th century France whose grotesque satire was deeply offensive, despite his being a man of the cloth. The most celebrated Rabelaisian writing focused on the Carnival which perpetuated the medieval traditions of the Feast of Fools in which society briefly revelled in anarchic chaos. The King was mocked, the aristocracy was mocked, the Church was mocked, and the people filled the streets with obscenities. But the essence of these cultural explosions was that they were officially endorsed by Church and State; here was a mechanism designed to release the pent up frustrations of the constricted masses. It was the equivalent of the dad letting his son beat him at football, just for one day – the kid has no clue that victory is a hollow one; it still feels like a win.

Clarkson performs this scandalising role for our benefit. All of us, at some point, fizz with rage at the little injustices of the world, and the Denim-quilted contrarian lets us yell them out, leading us in petty-minded prayer at the altar of “not my fault, guv”. Like Henry VIII’s favourite jester, Will Sommers, Clarkson spent a decade prodding the BBC, and the ‘easily-outraged Lefties’ like me, to see how close to the bone he could get. We’ve witnessed crass jokes about foreigners, sex workers butchered by a lorry-driving serial killer, blindness, mental health, and suicide. Some might argue convincingly that bad taste comedy is part of a healthy society, and they may have a point. But it can be a dangerous game to play. Sommers excelled at speaking truth to power, and dodged Henry VIII’s legendary temper when others couldn’t, but even he came a cropper over a gag involving the king’s wife and daughter – indeed, it nearly cost him his life.

Like the famed Tudor jester, Clarkson has finally come a cropper too. For some, there had already been too many apologies, half-apologies, and whiny seat squirms. They say his suspension was long overdue, and an assault on his producer was the last straw. But I’m not sure he was going anywhere until he raised a fist in anger. For all the talk of “Final Warnings”, that famed edginess was part of his brand and made Top Gear the most watched factual programme in the world.  It has been to the BBC what taxable cigarettes are to the NHS – an awkwardly profitable product.

Clarkson had survived countless scandals already: that Falklands fiasco which endangered his crew, that unbroadcast racial slur, and that time on live TV when he declared trade union strikers: “should be taken outside and shot in front of their families”.  All of these might have destroyed any other celeb. But Clarkson isn’t any other celeb; the man is a clown hired by the British public to say stupid stuff so we can get angry at him, and feel better about ourselves. His controversial blurtings are insincere incantations of wilful provocation for the sake of it.

He causes offence for a living, but punching a subordinate colleague is an actual offence.  Everything else was the inevitable blunderbuss of Clarksonian comedy, this is just violence in the workplace. He had to go. But I have no doubt he’ll be snapped up by other media channels. His career is far from over.

Jeremy Clarkson is probably quite charming in person. Or maybe he’s a grumpy curmudgeon. He may, as Rich Hall playfully noted in a documentary, even be a woman. The Clarkson we see on television is not a real human, though. The philosopher Jean Beaudrillard once famously suggested Disneyland was built to make the absurd Los Angeles seem real by comparison.  I sometimes wonder if Clarkson was assembled in a gothic castle to be a boorish barometer of public morality.

IF YOU FOUND THIS INTERESTING, CHECK OUT GREG’S BOOK FOR MORE FASCINATING HISTORY FACTS ABOUT DAILY LIFE

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Animals On The Wall: Cave Art & Stone Age Pets

Thousands of years ago in the frosty depths of the Last Ice Age, with each cool breath lingering wispily under their noses, people we might call Ug and Nug sat in dimly lit caves, ensconced from the perils of the outside world. At some point they looked at those barren cave walls and decided to scribble on them. The quality of these doodles shouldn’t’ come as a shock to us – Ug and Nug were anatomically no different to Leonardo Da Vinci – but somehow we still find ourselves astonished at the precision of those beautiful and striking cave figures. Yet what isn’t a shock is the subject matter because our ancient ancestors were just like us in their obsession with animals.

The Ardeche region in southern France is named after its river, a tributary of the Rhone, and the limestone cliffs that tower over crystal blue water make it a firm favourite with scenery-loving kayakers. But in 1994 three amateur cavers were exploring a dried up gorge when they felt a breeze blowing through what seemed like solid rock. Intrigued, they removed the tumble-down stones and were thrilled to uncover the entrance to a hidden cave. Venturing inside, it was as if they’d stepped through a time portal in a Jules Verne novel because before them were hundreds of bones, visible prehistoric footprints and, most-importantly of all, some of the oldest cave art ever found.

Dating to about 32,000 years ago, the entrance to Chauvet Cave is narrow but soon opens up into a wide series of chambers extending 400 metres into the rock, and on virtually every wall there are beautiful, haunting drawings of animals – 420 images of 13 separate species. This alone was revelatory, but what has most surprised archaeologists is that, amongst the rhinos and mammoths we might expect, was a preponderance of carnivorous predators: immense prowling bears, ferocious hyenas and snarling lions.

While it’s understandable why our ancestors would have wanted to draw them – this may have been the world’s first Health and Safety warning notice – such attention given to meat-eaters was not mirrored in other known cave art. Later Stone Age artists were much more likely to depict grass-nibblers such as horses, aurochs and mammoths than razor-toothed killers.  So, why did our ancestors stop scribbling portraits of carnivores and switch to herbivores instead? Was it a lunch menu of available meats, as when you walk into a fast food restaurant and stare at the photos of juicy burgers – “I’ll have the auroch and fries, please”…?

Or could it have been a magical form of wish-fulfilment in times of starvation, a way of asking Mother Nature to make these nomadic beasts appear? Were these creatures spirit guides in religious shamanistic rituals? Or were such murals even just hunting manuals, the equivalent of a tactical flipchart outlining the plan before a bank heist? “Jimmy Muscles, you poke it with the spear. Bobby the Flame, you wave the torch in its face. Short-Sighted Micky, try not to fall off the cliff again…”

As you can tell from my increasingly-desperate analogies, the purpose of cave art remains mysterious. But what’s interesting is that what was depicted on the walls wasn’t always what was eaten. At Altamira Cave in Spain, they drew bison but snacked on red deer. At Lascaux Cave, there’s only one reindeer on the walls, but it was by far their preferred meat. Perhaps drawing an animal was a way of recording its exciting novelty, the Stone Age equivalent of sharing a YouTube video – “guys, have you seen THIS?” We just don’t know.

IT’S BAD MANNERS TO EAT YOUR FRIENDS

What cave art doesn’t really suggest is whether our ancestors kept pets or not. There were suggestions in the 1980s that the huge number of bear skeletons found at Chauvet suggested humans lived alongside these animals, or even worshipped them, but that’s very hard to prove. There’s plenty of evidence for their bones being ritually stained with coloured ochre once they were dead, but that doesn’t really help us know how living bears were treated. Mostly, it seems people were in the business of eating animals, rather than feeding them. Indeed, to give you some idea of humanity’s impact on the natural world, we contributed to the extinction of 85% of large land animals (megafauna), including giant sloths, giant wombats, giant beavers, giant kangaroos and… er, mammoth-sized mammoths.

So, if we were busily wiping out anything with a heartbeat, did humans decide to spare some animals to keep as pets? Yes, the likely answer is that canines were our earliest companions, probably due to their dual abilities to hunt and act as danger-spotting sentinels. If I’d written this book in 2007, I’d now be telling you man’s best friend showed up 14,000 years ago, just before the end of the Ice Age, but new scientific research has blown that theory apart. A skull found in Belgium’s Goyet Cave has been scientifically dated to 31,700 years ago. DNA analysis suggests this animal was the product of a deliberate breeding program – it wasn’t a wolf, so it must have been Dog v.1.0.

Tellingly, dogs were given respectful burials in the Stone Age, not only alongside their human masters, but individually too (presumably because dogs live shorter lives than their owners). This act of burial suggests a close symbiotic relationship between human and animal. If the dog had merely been functionally useful in life, but un-mourned for in death, might we not have expected it to have been eaten for dinner or chucked in a ditch for the vultures to snack upon?

But it wasn’t just canines being invited into the cave. At Uyun al-Hammam in Jordan, in a grave dating back 16,500 years, a male skeleton has been found deliberately buried alongside fox remains, with both his corpse and the fox’s having been posthumously relocated from another grave. Was there a special connection between person and animal? Was the fox a pet? It does seem that way, or why else would both bodies be so carefully moved?

Similarly, more than 20,000 years after Chauvet’s denizens hired their animal-obsessed interior decorators, a young bear cub was probably kept as a tame pet in a rock shelter of the Grande-Rivoire in France. Examination of its skull fragments shows a rope had been looped over its teeth, distorting the normal jaw growth with a perfectly symmetrical groove. This was surely a bit risky – it’s not exactly like adopting a puppy, is it? – and we don’t know whether the animal’s death was commemorated with a touching funeral for a much-beloved pet, or whether it was slaughtered in panic by a terrified family who hadn’t quite realised that the cute little cub would turn into a giant killing-machine.

IF YOU FOUND THIS INTERESTING, CHECK OUT GREG’S BOOK FOR MORE FASCINATING HISTORY FACTS ABOUT DAILY LIFE

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