On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
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The domestic ferret (Mustela putorius furo) offers an unconventional but fascinating and unique opportunity to explore the complexities and dynamism of human-animal relationships. Despite being widely used today as working animals, pets, and subjects in biomedical research, the history of ferrets is widely uncertain, complicated by a scarcity of archaeological evidence and ambiguities within the historic record. What is clear, however, is that ferrets are a particularly striking case of how narratives about where and when an animal was domesticated can be built upon ambiguous and limited evidence. I will reinvestigate these narratives through an interdisciplinary approach which weaves together historical, linguistic, archaeological, and genomic evidence. By harnessing the opportunity to investigate one of few domestication events occurring in the historic period, I hope to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary research and uncover new insights into the domestication of ferrets – and domestication process more generally.
