JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Now, here's a truism you probably don't need to be reminded of. Where there are humans, there are rats. The small, human-shadowing mammals can be found on every continent on earth. But there's a lot people still don't know about their history. And as NPR's Nathan Rott reports, that may soon change.
NATHAN ROTT, BYLINE: About a minute into talking with Jason Munshi-South, I mentioned that I recently moved into a new house in Southern California, and he immediately assumed that I was about to bring up a rat problem.
Not yet.
JASON MUNSHI-SOUTH: My brother lives in Pasadena, and when I was there, there were rats running around on the roof of his garage. And he was like, can you get rid of these (laughter)? Like, I'll try.
ROTT: Munshi-South is an ecologist, a scientist at Drexel University, not a pest control expert. But, he says...
MUNSHI-SOUTH: Once you start working on rats, people have a lot of practical questions they want to ask you.
ROTT: Humans and rats have had a - let's call it volatile - relationship for thousands of years. That's because rats are what scientists call a commensal species.
MUNSHI-SOUTH: And in Latin, that literally means eating from the same table, so...
ROTT: You'd hope they're not eating literally from the same table.
MUNSHI-SOUTH: (Laughter) Sometimes they are, but - I've had some stories. There are infamous videos of this. But rats are companions almost. They're pests, but they're also companions.
ROTT: In a new paper in the journal Science, which has dedicated a special section to the furry, often unwanted companions, Munshi-South says that despite that long relationship, there's still a lot that people don't know about how rats came to be so close and so ubiquitous across the world.
MUNSHI-SOUTH: This is just a really complicated, tangled story that nobody has adequately addressed.
ROTT: Which may seem weird because rats have been used as pets and food throughout human history, and they also carry diseases and are critical to laboratory research on medicine and health, two other topics highlighted in the journal. Munshi-South says thanks to advances in genetics and paleoarchaeology, the study of ancient humans, scientists are about to learn a lot more about the creatures.
MUNSHI-SOUTH: We're at this cusp of a deluge of information about rats coming from these two fields.
ROTT: Which is important why?
MUNSHI-SOUTH: It's an interesting historical question in its own right because it actually maps on with human economies, human migrations, trade corridors, all these other things. They actually help us understand, as kind of a proxy, what humans were doing in various places and at various times.
ROTT: Learning about rats helps us learn about us, which is something that Kaylee Byers, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, thinks is true even in the modern sense.
KAYLEE BYERS: We need to not only understand the rat, but we actually also have to understand ourselves and our relationship to rats in order to move toward sort of like a healthier coexistence and management of these animals.
ROTT: Because love them, hate them, scared of them - rats are here to stay. Nathan Rott, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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