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3 Individual Animals Who Changed The Course of Human History

Animals have long been helpful to humanity but some have made some amazing contributions to advances in society

Andrew Martin
5 min readOct 13, 2021

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Going back thousands of years, animals have served humans as companions, food and sources of labor and resources. Their impact on society has been demonstrable. However, in some rare cases there have been individual animals who have quite literally changed the course of human history, including these three.

Montauciel the Flying Sheep: The human mastery of flight has truly made so many things more possible, such as air travel. The earliest pioneer in taking to the skies wasn’t actually a human but instead was a sheep named Montauciel (translated to flying up to the sky). In 1783, the Montgolfier brothers (Joseph-Michel and Jacque-Etienne) were excitedly demonstrating their recent invention, the hot air balloon, all over France. Finally, the big moment came where they were invited to show their contraption to King Louis XVI.

On the fateful day, the brothers prepared a launch in Versailles. Their balloon was tethered to a basket and inside they placed a rooster and a duck (added as control subjects due to their wings) and the aforementioned sheep. A cannon shot signified the start of the experiment and the…

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Andrew Martin
Andrew Martin

Written by Andrew Martin

Dabbler in soccer, history, investing & writing. Master’s degree in baseball history. Passionate about history, diversity, culture, sports, film and investing .

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