Like Lucy, the mother of man who came out of Africa, the mother(s) of all domestic cats might have been a resident of the middle east. Don’t worry, this is not the start of Friday Cat Blogging – I refer to a paper to be published in the June 29 issue of Science which traces the history of the domestication of the house cat. The research conducted on behalf of the National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Genomic Diversity by Carlos Driscoll of Oxford University concludes among other things:
- Cat domestication probably began some 12,000 years ago and became complete around 8,000 years later.
- DNA analysis shows that house cats all over the world, from Shanghai to San Paolo, can trace their ancestry to five distinct wildcat lineages in the near east – around Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE.
- Cats voluntarily adapted to humans and domesticated themselves upon finding safe living conditions around early agricultural settlements. Man probably played little or no role in the taming of the cat except to tolerate its presence around the home and the barn.
- Cats migrated with their human companions from their original habitat to different parts of the world.
- Although the cat earned its keep by killing rodents around the grain bins, the reason the cat became a beloved household animal (and even a divine deity, as in Egypt), probably had as much to do with its winning personality as its utility in the early agrarian society as a pest controller.
Painstaking genetic research shows that the cat first became domesticated soon after humans began farming and building the first civilizations, somewhere in the ancient Near East.
And, in typical feline fashion, the decision to take up residence was theirs.
“Cats weren’t domesticated on purpose, they just kind of invited themselves in,” said study lead author Carlos Driscoll, a doctoral fellow at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. He conducted the research while at the U.S. National Cancer Institute’s Laboratory of Genomic Diversity, in Frederick, Md.
By now, the world’s Fluffys and Sylvesters have planted their paws firmly across the globe. But these millions of cats appear to share a common ancestor, according to researchers reporting in the June 29 issue of Science. Driscoll’s team used genetic material gathered from cats worldwide to distinguish wild breeds from domesticated cats and hybrids, and to help determine when and where domestication first occurred.
“Cat domestication became complete by about 3,600 years ago, although the process probably began much earlier,” Driscoll said. “It probably began with the origins of agriculture, which was about 12,000 years ago.” As farmland in the Fertile Crescent (modern-day Iraq) kept humans rooted in one locale, the first cities grew.
“Cats are very adaptable, and they adapted themselves to this new environment,” Driscoll said.
Still, outside of their talent for eating mice and rats, felines weren’t of any obvious value to humankind — not like pigs, goats and cattle, which people worked hard to domesticate.
Instead, cats likely won humans over with a charm offensive, Driscoll said.
“Cats are nice. They tame down well, and there was just no reason for people not to like them,” he said. As cats started to hang around cities and homes, “they were tolerated and encouraged,” he added. It appears to have been the perfect plan, since the house cat now outranks the dog as the world’s most populous pet…
Based largely on the archaeological record, some experts had speculated that the domestication of the cat occurred in separate places at separate times, giving rise to distinct lineages around the world.
But the new gene study tells a different tale.
“All [domestic] cats are related to one another, and they all come from the same place, and that’s the Near East” Driscoll said. Today’s domestic cats probably all descend from the wild cat native to the area, Felis s. lybica.
As Driscoll speculates (bolded lines above), I too have wondered why we like cats (some of us more than others) since they don’t perform a “service” like most other domestic animals. My own theory is that
- The utterly independent, yet loving nature of the cat enchants cat lovers and we jokingly refer to all impossible tasks as “herding cats.” After thousands of years of tame living, the domestic feline remains at heart a wild predator and retains the finely tuned instincts of a flawless hunting machine. Living under the same roof with a cat is like sharing living quarters with a graceful killer of the wild, without the accompanying danger. Ironically and quite unsurprisingly, this is also why control freaks hate them and why cats have been the targets of unspeakable cruelties by humans, particularly in the medieval Christian world.
- Cats are meticulously clean animals and for the most part take care of their grooming (until old or sick) and bury their own excreta.
- An adult cat is roughly the same size as a 6 – 12 month old human baby. Holding a cat in our arms or in the lap feels very much like holding a baby. Probably a comforting sensation for most humans.
- The purring of a contented cat is as close as we can come to inter-species conversation.
Another report on the same findings in the New York Times. (links via Gene Expression where incidentally, Friday Cat blogging is a regular feature)
(Cross posted from Accidental Blogger)
Cat image copyright Jodie Black, PBJPHOTOS.
5 responses to “Cats and Humans – Domesticating Each Other”
Interesting study. That humans “played little or no role in the taming of the cat” is counter-intuitive though. In the stone age, I can imagine being pissed-off enough with a badly behaving cat to spear it and roast it for dinner (sorry for the dramatic imagery, cat lovers; not only did this happen then, cats are still a delicacy for some). The docile ones would have found more support for survival. Human selection must have played a role in their evolutionary trajectory, as it does today for dogs. As this article notes, “Humans helped to shape the early dog, not by selective breeding as in later times, but by changes in selective pressures created by human settlements.” The same must apply to cats, no?
Namit,
Unlike the dog which was domesticated some 100,000 years ago, the cat’s entry into the human realm was fairly recent – just around 10,000 or so years ago. So, the cat found residence with the agricultural man, not the stone age spear chucker and as such may have found a kinder, gentler reception than you envision. Although I don’t doubt that a few of them, especially when they first approached human settlements, must have got thrown on the grill, its rodent hunting abilities must have made a pretty quick impression on the agrarian man at pains to protect his grain. The fact that the cat needed little training to perform this useful task, may have been the reason that the early man left it alone and didn’t in any way try to “train” the cat. That the cat that sleeps with me in my bed, does not differ much in temperament from its wild cousins of the jungle, probably bears testimony to the lack of man driven domestication. But the fact that it co-exists with humans peacefully, reinforces the notion that the “domestication” was a voluntary act on the part of the feline, for its own comfort, safety and on its own terms.
More than the cat’s “taming” trajectory, what I found more interesting is the discovery that the common ancestors of the entire domestic cat population of the world were confined to the near east. Since wild cats are found on every continent, the bifurcation from wild to tame could have occurred anywhere, but didn’t. Note also, that the five maternal lineages that have been traced, did not start out simultaneously but occurred at different times as parallel events. But that they all took place repeatedly in the middle east, points to the early development of settled agricultural communities in that region and a tolerance for the cat among the inhabitants.
Although the Egyptians are most closely associated with cats (they had the right reverential attitude!), it was in communities in other places in the near east that the earliest evidence of man-cat domestication is found.
The research on the domestication of dogs still seems unsettled. “Some research appears to show that dogs were domesticated from wolves as recently as 15,000 years ago, or perhaps as early as 100,000 years ago based upon recent genetic, fossil and DNA evidence. Other research suggests that dogs have only been domesticated for a much shorter amount of time and were domesticated from populations of wild dogs, which had previously diverged from wolves. New evidence suggests that dogs were first domesticated in East Asia, possibly China, and the first peoples to enter North America took dogs with them from Asia…” (source)
That cats were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent makes sense since, as you say, here arose the first agrarian communities. The impetus for the adaptation of cats probably began with human settlements representing conditions favorable to their survival. So a bunch of cats were drawn to them, and people liked their rodent hunting skills. Now consider two cats, both with good rodent hunting skills: one ill-behaved from a human perspective (too wild, scary, vicious), the other docile and mellow. Guess which one ends up on the grill (or otherwise killed)? Over time, certain aggressive traits would tend to get weeded out of their gene pool. Your cat indeed shares the hunting instincts of its wilder cousins (no training was required for that) but it has also been selected for human friendly behavior. The same seems to have happened with dogs, where certain wolf-like traits of its ancestors were forced out of the gene pool, leading to gentler specimens on average. It’s sort of like how the average human might have turned out after a quarter-million years of selective pressure against warmongers like Cheney among us. 🙂
It is amazing how many of our domestic animals have their roots in the near east (most occurred naturally only there, unlike the cats, as you say). This is a major theme in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and he considers it a key factor in the later trajectory of civilizations.
Guns, Germs and Steel is a wonderful book. I read it a long time ago and don’t own a copy. Why don’t you do a review if you have enough recall of Diamond’s thesis?
As for cats being weeded out for friendly behavior, I agree that it probably happened to some extent. What man did NOT do with cats is selective breeding, as seems to have happened with other domestic animals like dogs, cattle, horses, donkeys (mules) who were classified according to specific “uses” like hunting, food, milk and beasts of burden. The “wild” nature of the cat on the other hand, served its purpose well enough for its limited “domestic” use. For the rest, humans probably just enjoyed their quirky, finicky and playfully charming (and wild) ways which required no training or weeding.
Yes, that makes sense to me. I read Guns, Germs and Steel years ago and liked it. It does a great job of explaining the material trajectories of various ancient peoples, until cities and trade and big religions arose and muddied up the earlier survival factors of humankind. To review it, I’d really need to read it again to do it full justice. A good starting point for those who haven’t read it is this page on Wikipedia. There is also a PBS series based on the book (on my Netflix list). Diamond has written another book, Collapse; check out Partha Dasgupta’s thoughtful review.