Jerry Moore

speaker

223 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 2 Feb

Jerry Moore’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · The Human Need to Matter & The Enduring Appeal of Cats · 5 Jan 2026 podcast

is one of the most enigmatic events in human prehistory.

Because on the one hand, it takes place when humans start not only raising their own food, but more particularly raising grains and storing them to be used throughout the year.

So you have like large storage of harvests.

But the ironic thing is that that sort of process occurs in different places around the world, including, for example, in ancient Mexico and Guatemala, Mesoamerica, or the Andes.

And in those places also, there are wild cats that you would think, well, maybe they would have been attracted to the pests that occupy storage bins of corn and things like that, but they weren't.

Because there's this other bizarre thing that happens, is that it's not just the fact that people are grazing grain, particularly wheat and barley in the Near East, and then storing it.

But at the same time, what we think of as the house mouse, Mus musculus, begins expanding out of the Himalayas of all places.

westward into the Near East and the Middle East.

And that animal goes into the storage bins, starts reproducing, and creates enough of a dietary basis to attract the wildcats in to eat those mice.

As far as we know, they come in naturally at first because they're scenting out or they're looking for this dense food supply.

But very quickly, human beings not only begin to try to control the breeding of cats, which is a virtually impossible thing to do until you have modern veterinary medicine.

But they are treating cats as pets and we can tell it from very early on.

So we've got, for example, 10,000 year old burials on the island of Crete where a young man in his 20s is dead.

has been buried, and he's buried next to his pet cat.

And we know that the cat is a pet because it's got a necklace around it.

It shows no evidence of trauma, so it's been kind of painlessly sacrificed to be with this young man.

And so that's a pretty interesting transformation that takes place.

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And so, for example, in the new kingdom of ancient Egypt, there was a goddess, Bubatas, who was a goddess of fertility and other sorts of things.

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