QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (46 page)

Probably in Scandinavia 4,000 years ago.

The development of metal tools during the Bronze Age made them possible. As a quick-to-build, durable, warm form of building they were used widely across northern Europe.

The ancient Greeks may also have a claim, because although the ancient coniferous forests have now receded from the Mediterranean, there is a theory that the Minoan’s and Mycenaean’s one-roomed house or
megaron
was originally made from horizontal pine logs.

It was through the Swedish and Finnish settlements in Delaware in the 1630s that the log cabin reached America, its spiritual home. British settlers, incidentally, constructed their homes of wooden planks, not logs.

A museum in Hodgenville, Kentucky, proudly displays the famous log cabin in which Abraham Lincoln was born, though it was, in fact, built thirty years after his death. This is uncomfortably close to the old schoolboy howler: ‘Abe Lincoln was born in a log cabin he built with his own hands.’

Despite this ludicrous fakery, the US National Park Service solemnly tells tourists not to use flash photography, in case they damage the historic logs.

Put away that cliché.

‘Cavemen’ isn’t a good description of Stone Age or palaeolithic people. It’s part of the ‘couldn’t-care-less-about-anything-much-before-the-Romans’ school of history teaching, much favoured in the late nineteenth century. It’s
not used by modern historians or archaeologists at all.

Palaeolithic humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers who occasionally used caves. There are 277 sites that have been identified in Europe – among them Altamira in Spain, Lascaux in France and Creswell Crags in Derbyshire. They left paintings and evidence of fires, cooking, rituals and burials, but they were not designed as permanent dwelling-places.

The earliest European cave art has been dated to 40,000 years ago, although the precise age is notoriously difficult to establish. Paint isn’t organic, so can’t be carbon-dated.

The most persuasive explanation of its function relates it to more recent cave painting among hunter-gatherer people in southern Africa and Australia. Here the paintings were the work of shamans, who entered the dark and often remote caves in order to connect with the spirit world. Another theory suggests they were simply palaeolithic teenage graffiti.

In northern China, an estimated 40 million people currently live in cave homes known as
yaodong.
As the human population of the entire planet in 8,000
BC
was probably only five million, there are eight times as many cavemen now than there were people of any kind then.

People who live in caves are called troglodytes, from the Greek for ‘those who get into a hole’.

Other places where there have been troglodyte dwellings in modern times include Cappadocia in Turkey, Andalucia in southern Spain, New Mexico in the USA and the Canary Islands.

This may be the beginning rather than the end of a trend. Research from the University of Bath has demonstrated that an underground home uses 25 per cent less energy than a normal house.

Around 14,000 years ago, palaeolithic hunter-gatherers on what is now the Russian/Mongolian border learned to lure reindeer away from their huge migratory groups and breed them to create their own small herd.

Reindeer were like walking corner-shops, offering meat, milk, and fur for clothing. It is possible that they trained dogs at the same time to help them domesticate the reindeer.

Today, there are about three million domesticated reindeer, most of them in the wastes of Lapland, which stretches across Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia.

The Lapps, who herd them, prefer to call themselves the Sami. Perhaps they don’t know that Sami is ancient Swedish for ‘chavs’.

‘Caribou’ is the North American name for reindeer. It comes from
xalibu
, ‘one who digs’ in the Mi’Maq (or Micmac) language of eastern Canada. Reindeer/caribou use their large feet to dig through to the lichen beneath the snow. Lichens provide two-thirds of a reindeer’s food.

Reindeer are nomadic and travel up to 4,800 km (3,000 miles) a year, the mammal travel record. They’re fast, too, reaching speeds of 77 kph (48 mph) on land and 9.6 kph (6 mph) in water. Because of a clicking tendon in their feet, a herd of migrating reindeer sounds like a castanet convention.

Here are the estimated dates for domestication of the major animals:

Domestication is different from taming. It implies selective breeding. Elephants can be tamed, but are not domesticated.

He was a girl.

Despite being called Rudolph and referred to as ‘him’, like all Santa’s reindeer ‘he’ must in fact have been female. Male reindeer lose their antlers at the beginning of the winter. Females keep their antlers until they give birth in the spring.

Reindeer/caribou are the only female deer to have antlers. They are shed and regrow every year. They are shorter and simpler than those of the males but still grow at a rate of more than 2.5 cm (1 inch) a day, making them the fastest-growing tissue of any mammal.

The other possibility is that Rudolph was a eunuch. The Sami sometimes castrate male reindeer, thus enabling them to keep their antlers, and to carry especially heavy loads.

Despite being native to North America, the domesticated turkeys that graced the tables of the Pilgrim Fathers had travelled out with them from England.

Turkeys first reached Europe in the 1520s, brought back from their native Mexico first to Spain and then sold throughout the continent by Turkish merchants. They quickly became a favourite food for the richer classes.

By 1585, turkey had become a Christmas tradition in England. Norfolk farmers set to work to produce a heavier-breasted, more docile version of the wild bird. The Norfolk Black and the White Holland were both English breeds reintroduced to America, and most domestic turkey now consumed in the USA derives from them.

From the late sixteenth century, English turkeys walked the 160 km (100 miles) from Norfolk to Leadenhall Market in London each year. The journey would take three months and the birds wore special leather boots to protect their feet.

A flock of 1,000 turkeys could be managed by two drovers carrying long wands of willow or hazel with red cloth tied on the ends. Traffic jams were caused by the vast flocks entering London from Norfolk and Suffolk in the weeks before Christmas.

Turkeys have nothing to do with Turkey. They were called ‘Turkie cocks’ in England because of the traders who supplied them. Maize, also originally from Mexico, was once called ‘turkie corn’ for the same reason.

In most other countries – including Turkey – they were named after India, perhaps because the Spanish returned with it from the ‘Indies’ (as America was called).

Only the Portuguese got close to the truth, calling the turkey a
peru
. The Native American word for turkey was
furkee
, according to the Pilgrim Fathers, although no one seems to
know which Algonquin language it comes from. In Choctaw they are called
fakit
, based on the sound the bird makes.

Even science seemed unsure what to call the turkey. The Latin name
Meleagris gallopavo
translates literally as the ‘guinea-fowl chicken-peacock’, which looks like linguistic spread-betting.

A male turkey is called a stag, gobbler or tom. The female is always a hen. Turkeys are the largest creatures able to give birth without sex: the offspring of such virgin births are male, and invariably sterile.

Most languages write the turkey’s gobble as
glu glu
or
kruk
,
kruk
. In Hebrew, however, they go
mekarkerim
.

Mary.

This catches out a lot of non-Catholics. The Immaculate Conception refers to birth of the Virgin Mary, not the virgin birth of Jesus.

It is commonly confused with the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, by which Mary became pregnant with Jesus through the Holy Spirit.

Under the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, Mary was granted immunity from all suspicion of sin at the moment 
she was conceived.

Unfortunately, the Bible doesn’t make any reference to this happening. It only became an official Catholic dogma in 1854.

Many theologians believe the doctrine to be unnecessary because Jesus redeemed everyone anyway.

The Virgin Birth is a core doctrine of the Church but that doesn’t mean it is beyond controversy. It is explicitly mentioned in Luke and Matthew’s Gospels but not by the earlier Gospel of St Mark, or the even earlier letters of St Paul.

St Paul, in his letter to the Romans, states clearly that Jesus ‘was made of the seed of David, according to the flesh’. We also know that the earliest Jewish Christians, called Nazarenes, didn’t believe in the virgin birth either.

The ‘supernatural’ elements of Jesus’s life story became exaggerated as the new religion gradually absorbed pagan ideas to broaden its appeal.

The virgin birth wasn’t a part of Jewish tradition. But Perseus and Dionysus in Greek mythology, Horus in Egyptian and Mithra, a Persian deity whose cult rivalled Christianity in popularity, were all ‘born of virgins’.

No.

Not according to the New Testament. The idea that Jesus was born in a stable is an assumption made only because St Luke’s Gospel says he was ‘laid in a manger’.

Nor is there any biblical authority for the presence of animals at the Nativity. Of course, we’re all familiar with the scene from the crib we see in churches and schools, but it was 1,000 years before it was invented.

St Francis of Assisi is credited with making the first crib, in 1223 in a cave in the hills above Greccio. He placed some hay on a flat rock (which can still be seen), put a baby on top and added carvings of an ox and an ass (though no Joseph, Mary, Wise Men, Shepherds, angels or lobsters).