Ever since Homo sapiens domesticated grains and animals, mice have been our uninvited hangers-on, always happy to grab an easy meal and take up free lodging afforded to them by human settlement. In agricultural societies of the ancient Near East, the mouse and similar rodents were primarily thought of as vermin and a major source of crop damage. In modern usage, the term “mouse” is not strictly taxonomic and is applied also to species from outside the genus mus. Ancient texts similarly do not allow one to determine the exact species of rodent, whether mouse or otherwise; for example, […]
