[Sca-cooks] [Fwd: rabbits vs. hares]

[Laura C. Minnick]

This is pretty cool- thought you would enjoy it!

'Lainie

Thor Ewing wrote:
>
> From: Dominik Halas <d.halas at UTORONTO.CA>
>
> > The rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) and the hare (Lepus europaeus) are two
> > different creatures.  The hare was first introduced into Britain by the
> > Romans.
>
> The earliest hare bones from Britain are in the group from Star Carr in
> Yorkshire, which also includes the famous deer skull adapted to form human
> headgear.  This suggests that hare was a part of the British diet even in
> the Mesolithic.  But this was probably a mountain hare, a species which may
> have died out during the Mesolithic.  Despite legend to the contrary, the
> British reindeer is thought to have become extinct at about the same time.
>
> Brown hare bones have been identified at Hartledale in Derbyshire from the
> Bronze Age apparently side-by-side with mountain hare bones.  Whilst neither
> species can be seen as typical for the Bronze Age, brown hare bones occur in
> Iron Age contexts at Danebury, Winnal Down, Maiden Castle, and Blunsdon St
> Andrews, so we can be fairly confident that they came, saw and conquered
> long before Caesar.
>
> Although at one point it was thought that rabbits might also have been
> present in Mesolithic times, and became extinct only to be re-introduced by
> the Normans, the bones which gave rise to this speculation have been
> radio-carbon dated to c.1710 and are not Mesolithic at all.
>
> Interestingly, as well as rabbits and fallow deer, black rats are missing
> from the Anglo-Saxon fauna, though I don't suppose this was much of a loss
> to their diet.
>
> Ref: Derek Yalden, The History of British Mammals, T & AD Poyser Ltd.,
> London 1999
>
> Best wishes,
> Thor