Published on :
About 2022 years ago, Jesus was born in a stable in Palestine, surrounded by a donkey and an ox. It’s in your nature celebrates Christmas with donkeys, ancestral companions of humans since their domestication in East Africa 5,000 BC.
Hi Han ! The donkey brays, and it is a cry familiar to the human species long before the birth of Jesus: for 7,000 years, since this cousin of the horse was domesticated in the Horn of Africa, as just show, thanks to genetics, a study of the Center of anthropobiology and genomics of Toulouse, directed by Ludovic Orlando.
The domestication of the donkey, 5,000 years before the birth of Jesus Christ, coincides with the moment when the Sahara begins to become a desert. Two possibly related events. “ Perhaps in the face of this climate change which created large expanses of desert, the men and women who lived there took over on the donkey to move around and move their equipment “, supposes Ludovic Orlando, “molecular archaeologist” and director of research at the CNRS.
Adapted to arid climates
The donkey is a resistant animal, enduring, solid on its hooves, less fragile and less demanding than the horse. A donkey’s horse do not fear (too much) the heat – one does not make drink a donkey which is not thirsty. “ The physiology of the donkey makes it a beast particularly well cut for hot and arid climates », explains Ludovic Orlando. ” A donkey needs much less water than the 20 liters of water that, for example, horses drink every day. It naturally heats up less quickly, offers greater resistance to heat. »
With all these qualities, the domestic donkey, or the common donkey, then conquered the planet at the rate of human migrations, which it facilitated. There is, so to speak, only one line of domestic donkeys in the world. All the donkeys today” are somehow descended from the African wild ass », underlines Ludovic Orlando, since the donkey was « once domesticated “. The study he led closes decades of scientific wrangling “. But today, donkey populations are declining in many African countries, due to theft and trafficking. The donkey is threatened by Chinese medicine which uses ejiao, donkey skin gelatin.
Stubborn
The horse was domesticated much later, 3,000 years after the donkey, in the steppes of the Caucasus, which then became almost desert. The same causes produce the same effects. “ The domestication of the horse was a response of the men and women who lived at that time in that part of the world to increase their mobility. », poursuit Ludovic Orlando. « And so we can clearly see how the motivation for the domestication of the horse was that of another type of aridification, in very different latitudes. »
But the donkey has a less good reputation than the horse, noble animal par excellence, in the literal sense: the favorite animal of the nobility “, emphasizes Ludovic Orlando. Despite a certain biblical prestige (a donkey leaned over the cradle of Jesus in a stable in Bethlehem in Palestine, and it was on a donkey that Christ made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem), the expressions are numerous in the language French to denigrate this faithful companion of the human species for millennia: ” donkey », « donkey », « stubborn like a jackass », « dumb as a donkey »… But we are wrong. The pack donkey is not beta. “ It is a fabulous animal, very fine, which can solve logic problems », assure Ludovic Orlando. « So I guess what to say “dumb as a donkey” it is above all to reflect the extent of our own stupidity. So often this ” stubborn ” persists, for lack of an interlocutor who is capable of entering into his own logic. “We are all someone else’s donkey.
“And the beef, who cares? »
Present alongside the donkey for the birth of Jesus, the ox is today man’s best friend and his barbecue… But it was primarily for his strength that he was domesticated, like the donkey, and at about the same time in Mesopotamia. The ox is a castrated bull, so that it is less aggressive, and to prevent it from impregnating all the cows in the herd instead of the breeding bull selected by the breeder. But when you eat beef, in France, there’s a 95% chance that it won’t be. What is called beef is most often cow.