Cats Ancestors Came To People For Their Food
Jun 29th, 2007 | 13 responses
Did you ever think your purring cat wouldn’t love you so much if you didn’t fill her bowl every morning?
It that happened, you could say it runs in the family: a major new study published today in the journal of Science says that the ancestors of today’s domestic cats came to and bonded with humans for f-o-o-d — unlike other animals such as dogs:
Your hunch is correct. Your cat decided to live with you, not the other way around. The sad truth is, it may not be a final decision.
But don’t take this feline diffidence personally. It runs in the family. And it goes back a long way — about 12,000 years, actually.
Those are among the inescapable conclusions of a genetic study of the origins of the domestic cat, being published today in the journal Science.
The findings, drawn from an analysis of nearly 1,000 cats around the world, suggest that the ancestors of today’s tabbies, Persians and Siamese wandered into Near Eastern settlements at the dawn of agriculture. They were looking for food, not friendship.
They found what they were seeking in the form of rodents feeding on stored grain. They stayed for 12 millennia, although not without wandering off now and again to consort with their wild cousins.
The story is quite different from that of other domesticated animals: cattle, sheep, goats, horses — and dogs, cats’ main rivals for human affection. It may even provide insight on the behavior of the animal that, if not man’s best friend, is certainly his most inscrutable.
“It is a story about one of the more important biological experiments ever undertaken,” said Stephen J. O’Brien, a molecular geneticist at the National Cancer Institute’s laboratory in Frederick, Md., and one of the supervisors of the project.
“We think what happened is that cats sort of domesticated themselves,” said Carlos A. Driscoll, the University of Oxford graduate student who did the work, which required him, among other things, to befriend feral cats on the Mongolian steppes.
The study also says the ancestors of today’s house kitties also condescended to join man (and woman) in the fertile crescent (instead of Egypt) nearly 10,000 years ago, much earlier than previously believed.
And all cats have comon ancestry:
Any cat owner who’s watched Fluffy intently stalk a bird knows the behavioural differences between the tame tabby and its wild feline cousins are pretty razor thin. Now scientists using DNA testing have figured out why.
It turns out the ubiquitous housecat, in all its breeds and multiple coat variations, is descended from one common ancestor, a subspecies of a wild cat that still haunts the woodlands from Scotland to the tip of South Africa and pockets of Asia and the Middle East.
This subspecies of wild cat, known formally as Felis silvestris lybica, is the many-times great-grandparent of today’s domesticated cat, which can trace its lineage back more than 100,000 years.
“All domestic cats have a common ancestor,” said Carlos Driscoll of the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at the U.S. National Cancer Institute, the lead researcher on the project. “And that common ancestor seems to be the wild cat that lives in the Near East.”
Housecats the world over are virtually indistinguishable genetically to wild cats living in what was the Fertile Crescent, the area that includes parts of modern-day Iraq, Israel, Syria and southern Turkey.
And the fact house kitties are around has had an impact in several areas:
The domestication of the cat, a carnivore, has had a significant impact on populations of small animals. America’s 90 million cats alone are estimated to killed anywhere from 120 million to more than 500 million birds annually. Hundreds of millions of rodents, reptiles, and amphibians also fall prey to cats each year.
So be nice to your cat because her ancestors domesticated themselves. She has chosen YOU (or, your food..).
ALSO OF INTEREST:
The human-cat bond
The human-companion animal bond with cats
The cat-human bond
How Cats Took Over The World
Wikipedia: Cat
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13 Responses to “Cats Ancestors Came To People For Their Food”
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Dogs have masters, cats have slaves.
Cats probably did initially come to humans for food, but I doubt that today’s house cat stays for that reason. Many hunt on their own, and so don’t really need humans for that reason. I think it may provide a partial explanation, but cats also crave human companionship and warmth, as anyone who has had the pleasure of the affection and closeness of a purring feline will attest to.
Cats Rule!
CS, no it’s “Dogs have masters, cats have servants.”
I grew up with both cats and dogs and currently have 2 cats since I work too many hours to have a dog. We’ve had cats that never wandered out of the house/yard to ones that only came near for food. So I can agree with the articles/studies but I think KRitter has a point too, some cats seem to want more than just food they want companionship too.
Oh, and it’s good to see you pointing more CS!
Awesome comment, CS! I like it!
Yep, they definitely want more than food. Every one we have will come to us for some affection, asking in their own way. We keep some dry cat food up out of dog range but where the cats can hop up to help themselves. Marvin(the Martian Kitty), my cat, will hop up there in the morning when I am getting my to-go cup of coffee ready and stare at me until I pet him. Once he’s gotten his attention it’s breakfast time.
There was a video on MSNBC a while back that showed a music teacher’s cat who had learned to play the piano. The teacher believed that the cat viewed her paying students as “competition”, and so learned the skill in order to get equal attention.
Cats are infinitely more interesting than dogs. Every cat I’ve ever owned has been individuated. Dogs are either asskissers or vicious.
Seems that way to me when I visit my friend in DC (self-professed radical, GBLT activist, cat lover, feral cat rescuer, and PETA member — and of course, vegetarian bordering on veganism)
And she wonders why I laugh at her when she says she’s “child-free” …. her ten-plus “children” she devotes her spare time to are quite independent, but still demanding sometimes as well as affectionate sometimes.
I’ve never found cosmo’s generalization to be true. Each of the dogs in the house are their own creatures as well as the cats. There’s the elderly 15 pound queen of the house, the schnauzer who has insecurity problems for her own reasons (Her first human had to give her up.) who wants lots of attention and doesn’t like cats but remembers most of the time that she has to put up with them, the other rescued dog from the pound who hates to have “mom” out of sight for a minute and just loves his toys to the point that any stuffed animal that comes into the house is viewed as his so we have to be careful he doesn’t see some presents for the grandkids and then there’s the 80 pound 4 year old “puppy” who is in some ways the most spoiled of the bunch but is kind enough to let the humans use his bed at night even though he’s had a hard day of guarding his yard from those people who dare to walk on the sidewalk behind it.
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