Chapter 1164: The Mystery of Hair Color

These archaeologists and local workers have been cooperating tacitly for a long time. Immediately, someone jumped into the pit with a special container, carefully packed the freshly unearthed cat mummy into the container, and brought it up for Hans to see.

Zhang Zian, who saw the cat mummy for the first time, was very surprised. He even felt Richard's paw on his shoulder shrink slightly, which showed that it was also deeply shocked.

So did the other elves who followed him.

The cat mummy's body and limbs are wrapped in a woven mat-like linen fabric, only the head is exposed, and the overall appearance looks like a bowling pin.

Only from the exposed head, it is difficult to tell that it is a cat, because the face is blurred, and even one ear is missing. It is said that the head of a cat is more like a pig's head, and it can only be seen from the outline outlined by the paint. A little bit of a cat's shadow.

Hans had already seen the strangeness, and waved his hand to take the mummy away and store it carefully.

"Are you surprised? People who saw cat mummies for the first time all had expressions similar to yours. There are at least tens of thousands of mummies like this buried under the ruins of this temple." Hans said with a shrug.

According to Hans, the underground tomb of the Best Temple was first discovered by a local farmer in 1888. About 19 tons of various mummies were unearthed, piled up into a layer 60 meters long and 21 meters thick, among which the mummies of cats It accounts for the majority, a full 80,000, and there are also mummies of mongooses, dogs and foxes. The farmer sold most of the mummies, ground them up and used them as fertilizer, and only a few were preserved and shipped to the British Museum.

The earth pit where Hans and his colleagues worked was another smaller catacomb, and only sporadic mummies were found—the so-called sporadic refers to the two figures of 80,000 and 19 tons.

In ancient Egypt, when a family cat died, the owner would send the cat's body to Bubastis as soon as possible, and the priests would make a mummy for burial and dedicate it to the goddess Best. In order to keep cats from starving in the underworld, cat mummies are often buried with mouse mummies and wooden fish-shaped toys.

Over time, an unknown number of cat mummies were buried around the Temple of Best.

"Do you think I came here to look for murals and reliefs? No, we are looking for these mummies. It is also because of the existence of these mummies that the cooperation between the three countries has been facilitated." Hans laughed.

Zhang Zian still didn't quite understand, "What's the use of these mummies? I mean other than cultural relics."

These mummies may have certain value in archaeology, but for Wei Kang and the scientific expedition team, what is the use of mummies? After all, they were looking for live cats, not mummified dead cats.

The process of making cat mummies is similar to that of human mummies: first, soak the cat's body in a special salt water to dissolve the oil, wash off the skin and hair; after soaking for 40 days, take the body out to dry; Embalming the corpse, filling the abdominal cavity with spices, coating the body surface with gum to prevent the corpse from coming into contact with air; finally wrapping the corpse in linen.

The brain and internal organs have been taken out in advance and put into a funeral urn for permanent preservation.

It is precisely because the skin will be washed off during the treatment that the appearance of these cat mummies is not flattering, and it is precisely because of this that it is impossible to judge the evolution of Egyptian cat coat color from the cat mummies.

So what does a cat mummy mean to the expedition?

Hans smiled mysteriously, "The answer is - dna."

Zhang Zian seemed to understand a little bit.

Egypt's hot and dry climate combined with the ancient Egyptians' special methods of making mummies made the corpses often well preserved, and DNA could still be extracted from mummies even after thousands of years.

In an article published in the journal "Nature"-"Paleogenetics of Cat Transmission in the Ancient World", scientists studied the migration process of cats through the DNA in more than 200 cat mummies or remains.

The mummies and remains were from Europe, North Africa, East Africa and South West Africa,

The time span is from the Mesolithic to the 20th century.

But considering such a long time span, this sample size is actually a bit small.

The true scientific spirit is to have reasonable doubts and not to blindly follow authority, which is the foundation for science to change with each passing day.

Hans and the others were skeptical about the conclusions of this "Paleogenetics of Cat Transmission in the Ancient World", and they believed that the number of samples in this article was not enough to support the corresponding conclusions.

Local scholars in Egypt also expressed dissatisfaction with the conclusion of this article, because the article said that domestic cats were first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, not in ancient Egypt.

Based on the principle of resignation, Hans and the others hit it off with the Biology Department of Cairo University to conduct the same research. They also planned to find a more reasonable explanation for the domestication and migration process of domestic cats through the study of DNA in mummies.

Humans have no tradition of using cats as food, so it is difficult to find cat remains in ancient human settlements, which brings great difficulties to research work, but Egypt's unique climate and geographical advantages and ancient customs have preserved a large number of cats here. Mummies and naturally formed mummy became the source of Hans's confidence. They think that as long as they take time, they will be able to overturn the conclusion of that article.

Coincidentally, after Wei Kang contacted the Department of Archaeology of Cairo University, he was overjoyed when he learned of this research, because the evolution of cat coat color can be discovered through the DNA in the mummy.

The coat color of African desert wild cats is relatively fixed, so how did domestic cats evolve into hundreds of coat colors in later generations?

It may be unbelievable to say, but science has flourished to the point where it has not even fully understood the genetic mechanism of cat coat color.

The genetic mechanism of cat coat color is extremely complex, and it is an outlier among mammals, which is completely different from most other mammals.

For example, the calf born of two black and white cows must be black and white, but the position of the plaque may be different.

But the offspring of two reddish-brown cats could be a litter of tortoiseshell kittens—not greened, of course.

Two colorpoint Siberian forest cats can also produce a litter of kittens that differ in coat color from the parents.

Therefore, it is very difficult for pet breeding experts to breed new breeds of domestic cats. It often takes several or even more than ten generations of pedigree and solidification to produce a new breed with stable coat color genes.

Although Wei Kang is not engaged in pet breeding, as an expert in cat research, he is very aware of this, so he sent a cooperation invitation to Hans and the others, asking them to provide corresponding dna research reports, in order to discover the original Egyptian cat from the cat mummy key points of evolution.