Herodotus's gold-digging ants may really have been Himalayan marmots
The Greek historian Herodotus told of giant ants that dug up gold. The explorer Michel Peissel argued the tale grew from golden marmots on Pakistan's Deosai Plateau, whose burrows throw up gold dust that local Brokpa people collected. The real animals are the heaviest members of the squirrel family, and champion hibernators.
The genus Marmota contains 15 species across Asia, Europe and North America. They are stout ground squirrels with short, powerful legs, big digging claws and large incisors for chewing through grasses, flowers, berries, roots, mosses and lichens. Most measure 42 to 72 centimetres long. Smaller species average about 2 kilograms in spring, while larger ones reach roughly 8 kilograms by autumn and sometimes top 11. In North America the Alaska marmot seems to be the smallest and the Olympic marmot the largest. Coat colour tends to match surroundings, paler in open country and darker in forest.
Marmots spend summer active and often in groups, then vanish underground to hibernate. By the strict physiological definition, the biggest of them rank as the largest true hibernators, since bears do not share the traits of obligate hibernators such as many rodents and bats. Most species are highly social and whistle loudly to one another when alarmed, which is why the groundhog, or woodchuck, is also nicknamed whistlepig. Some live in the Alps, Pyrenees, Rockies and Sierra Nevada, while others prefer rough grassland and the Eurasian steppe. The yellow-bellied marmot usually lives above 2,000 metres, often in rock piles. Prairie dogs, though similar, belong to a separate genus.
People have noticed them for a long time. Some historians think creatures described by Strabo and Agatharchides were marmots, and Jacopo Ligozzi printed an anatomically accurate picture of one as early as 1605. The name's origin is uncertain: perhaps a Gallo-Romance root for mumbling, imitating their sounds, or Latin for mountain mouse. Marmots were once part of Swiss Alpine peasants' diets, and since 2010 Alaska has marked 2 February as Marmot Day in place of Groundhog Day.
A darker possibility has also been raised. Some historians and palaeogeneticists suggest marmots may have been among the natural reservoirs of the plague bacterium behind the fourteenth-century Black Death.
Source: Marmot
