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b"Thanks to Hannah, who suggested sheep as this week's topic! We'll also learn about a few other hoofed animals, including the weird giraffe relative, sivatherium.\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nThe American Jacob Sheep Breeders' Association\\n\\nWhat happened with that Sumerian 'sivathere' figurine after Colbert's paper of 1936? Well, a lot.\\n\\nA Jacob sheep ewe with four horns (pic from JSBA site linked above):\\n\\n\\n\\nThe male four-horned antelope [photo by K. Sharma at this site]:\\n\\n\\n\\nA modern reconstruction of sivatherium that looks a lot like a giraffe [By Hiuppo - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2872962]:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe rein ring in question (on the left) that might be a siveratherium but might just be a deer:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nThis week we\\u2019re going to look at an animal suggested by Hannah a long time ago. Hannah suggested we talk about sheep, and I can\\u2019t even tell you how many times I almost did this episode but decided to push it back just a little longer. Finally, though, we have the sheep episode we\\u2019ve all been waiting for! We\\u2019re also going to learn about a strange animal called sivatherium and a mystery surrounding when it went extinct.\\n\\nThe sheep has cloven hooves and is a ruminant related to goats and cattle. It mostly eats grass, and it chews its cud to further break down the plants it eats. It\\u2019s one of the oldest domesticated animals in the world, with some experts estimating that it was first domesticated over 13,000 years ago. Mammoths still roamed the earth then. Sheep are especially useful to humans because not only can you eat them, they produce wool.\\n\\nWool has incredible insulating properties, as you\\u2019ll know if you\\u2019ve ever worn a wool sweater in the snow. Even if it gets wet, you stay nice and warm. Even better, you don\\u2019t have to kill the sheep to get the wool. The sheep just gets a haircut every year to cut its wool short. Wild sheep don\\u2019t grow a lot of wool, though. They mostly have hair like goats. Humans didn\\u2019t start selecting for domestic sheep that produced wool until around 8,000 years ago.\\n\\nLike other animals that were domesticated a very long time ago, including dogs and horses, we\\u2019re not sure what the direct ancestor of the domestic sheep is. It seems to be most closely related to the mouflon, which is native to parts of the middle east. The mouflon is reddish-brown with darker and lighter markings and it looks a lot like a goat. Other species of wild sheep live in various parts of the world but aren\\u2019t as closely related to the domestic sheep. The bighorn and Dall sheep of western North America are closely related to the snow sheep of eastern Asia and Siberia. The ancestors of all three species spread from eastern Asia into North America during the Pleistocene when sea levels were low and Asia and North America were connected by the land bridge Beringia.\\n\\nThe male sheep is called a ram and grows horns that curl in a spiral pattern, while the female sheep is called a ewe. Some ewes have small horns, some don\\u2019t. This is the case for both wild and domestic sheep. Sheep use their horns as defensive weapons, butting potential predators who get too close, and they also butt each other. Rams in particular fight each other to establish dominance, although ewes do too.\\n\\nBut some breeds of domestic sheep are what is called polycerate, which means multi-horned. That means a sheep may have more than two horns, typically up to six. Many years ago I kept a few Jacob sheep, which are a polycerate breed, and in a Patreon episode from 2018 I went into really too much detail about this particular breed of sheep. I will cut that short here.\\n\\nThe Jacob is a hardy, small sheep with tough hooves, and it\\u2019s white with black spots. Ideally, a Jacob sheep will have four or six well-balanced horns. In a six-horned sheep, the upper pair branch upward, the middle pair curl like an ordinary ram\\u2019s horns,"