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
OF RELATED INTEREST:
Visit the blog TWO CAT FREAKS for some fascinating info.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.