February 14, 2018 was Valentine's Day and Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. Millions of Catholics all over the world mark their ashes on their foreheads and do not eat meat.
You should not consume animal meat such as beef, pork, chicken, mutton, rabbit meat on Ash Wednesday and every Friday of Lent. In the past, there were times when rabbit meat was not included in this list.
Is rabbit fish?
About 600 AD, Pope Gregory I published an edict not to include rabbit meat on the prohibited list. He said rabbit meat is fish, not meat, so you can eat rabbit meat on Lent Friday.
As the edict spread, the French monks plunged to gather new food items. They breed rabbits and made them into livestock.
This was discovered by German zoologists in the 1930s. They claimed to have found a manuscript of the 6th century. Until it turned out that this was not true, scientists followed their argument. That is, there was a fake news long before the US President Donald Trump called CNN, the news media, fake news.
There is evidence, however, that the Romans raised wild rabbits early in the first century. This is reported as an anecdote by Gregory of Tour and Bishop historian. According to him, a man named Lokolenus ate the rabbit at Lent. However, Lacolenus was soon sick and died, and people thought it was God's curse. Because Lollicolus died after eating a rabbit in Lenten.
Oxford University's evolutionary biologist Gregory Larson cites what Gregory of Tours has written.
New analysis
However, according to a new analysis published in a journal on ecology and evolutionary trends, rabbits seem to have been domesticated by French monks around the 12th century.
Larsen wanted to test DNA modeling methods developed to map modern livestock and wildlife genes. First, the edict of Pope Gregory I was the starting point. He asked a graduate student to find out if the edict actually existed, and it turned out that it did not exist.
What this graduate student found was a narrative left by Gregory of Tour. During the Lent of the 1900s, some scholars misunderstood the idea and allowed rabbit meat to be consumed.
The next step in the research was genetic analysis. They said that most of the modern pet rabbits were from European rabbits that roamed southern France and northeastern Spain for millions of years.
Rabbits living in France are likely to have moved to Spain during the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago. After the ice disappeared, the rabbits returned to France. In other words, according to DNA studies, modern rabbits all originated in France.
Genome Research
Larson and his colleagues studied wild rabbits and the genetics of the domesticated French rabbit. According to the analysis, there were divisions between 12 and 17,000 years ago, before the Vatican imposed edicts. The researchers found specific physical cues, such as stray ears and other aggressive or less aggressive characteristics.
It was in the 1500s that the change in the search for rabbits was recorded. Also in the 1700s, rabbit breeding began, and the skeleton and size of the rabbit were recorded.
The researchers found that when a mutation rate of a particular biomolecule was used as a molecular clock, the rabbit could not specify the date or time it became a livestock.
It was only an incident that occurred between the Stone Age and the Roman Age. Larsen said it was the first time the Romans recorded rabbits for historical evidence.
Archaeological evidence has also been found that the Paleolithic rabbits were hunted in the Iberian Peninsula and in the southwestern part of France. Rabbits were food transported throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. Larsen said that the specific difference between the wild rabbit and the domesticated rabbit in the rabbit's bone began to appear distinctly 2,000 years later.
