Posted on 06/29/2007 8:02:15 AM PDT by DogByte6RER
Scientists believe cats 'sort of domesticated themselves'
THE WASHINGTON POST
June 29, 2007
WASHINGTON – 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 the analysis of nearly a thousand 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 some 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 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 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.
There are today 37 species in the family Felidae, ranging from lions through ocelots down to little Mittens. All domestic cats are descended from the species Felis sylvestris (“cat of the woods”), which goes by the common name “wildcat.”
The species is indigenous to Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. The New World, Japan and Oceania lack wildcats. Their closest counterpart in North America is the lynx.
There are five subspecies of wildcats and they look very much like many pet cats, particularly nonpedigree ones. The Scottish wildcat, for example, is indistinguishable from a barn cat with a mackerel tabby coat. These animals, however, are true wild species. They are not escaped pets that have become “feral,” or reverted to the wild.
Driscoll and his collaborators, who included Oxford zoologist David Macdonald, took blood samples and ear punch biopsies from all wildcat subspecies, and from fancy-breed cats, ordinary pet cats, and feral cats. They analyzed two different kinds of genetic fingerprints.
One was nuclear DNA, which carries nearly all of an animal's genes and reflects inheritance from both parents. The other was mitochondrial DNA, which exists outside the cell nucleus, carries only a few genes, and descends through the generations only from the mothers, never from fathers.
Both fingerprints showed that domesticated cats all around the world are most closely related to the wildcat subspecies (called lybica) that lives in the Near East.
One might think that people in each region would have domesticated their local wildcats. In that case, European pet cats today would genetically most closely resemble European wildcats and Chinese cats would be descended from East Asian wildcats. But that isn't the case.
Why not?
Genetics can't answer the question, but history and archaeology can provide a good guess.
Large-scale grain agriculture began in the Near East's “Fertile Crescent.” With the storage of surplus grain came mice, which fed on it and contaminated it.
Settled farming communities with dense rodent populations were a new habitat. Wildcats came out of the woods and grasslands to exploit it. They may have lived close to man – but not petting-close – for centuries.
Eventually, though, natural selection favored individual animals whose genetic makeup by chance made them tolerant of human contact. Such behavior provided them with them with things – a night indoors, the occasional bowl of milk – that allowed them to out-compete their scaredy-cat relatives in town.
ping
We know this.
Is THIS what we know??? : )
Well, D'OH!
My cat, Ace, has at least a couple of dozen variations of "meows" "preows" and "peuws", some of which might mean "pet me" or "let me out", but most of them are variations of
FEED ME! "
We recently moved (a month ago). I would say that would qualify as the kind of event that would upset a cat. The only thing is that before the move, this particular cat wanted to be an "outside" cat from the moment we took him home from the shelter. When he peed on a bunch of things in the house my wife got so angry that she let him go outside (thinking he would be gone for good). To our surprise, he simply spent his evenings prowling the neighborhood for adventure and coming back to the house for napping, eating, and the occasional affection. Shortly after that, he disapeared for two days and we got a call from a shelter.
I thought that when we moved, he would bolt for good, but he simply repeated his routine of hanging around the new house and prowling at night, and then finding new favorite places to perch and sleep during the day. We disappeared for 3 or 4 days, and we thought he was gone, but we found him hanging around our local synagogue and one of the kids picked him up and carried him home. He went back to his "normal" routine. He disapeared for another 2 days a couple of weeks later and we get a call from yet another shelter that they have our cat (from the implant chip). Another do-gooder had picked him up, drove him to the shelter nearest her home which was 30 miles away from us. He did not run away, but he is a notorious flirt with people and she picked him up, thinking she was saving him.
Now he has gone again. We haven't been called by any shelters, and I haven't seen him around the area at all. Who knows what happened to him. He may turn up in a day, a month, or a year. We may get a call from another shelter because of the implanted chip or he may be road-kill. Who knows.
We speculated that it was more because he was a male cat and that a female cat would not have been as "outdoor". The kids want another cat, but I am not ready yet.....
And people are just warm furniture...
What are the things we call wildcats/bobcats if they are not wildcats? A lynx variant?
haha. i am greeted each day by four kitties staring at me, waiting for me to wake up. i had two. then two more (a mom and baby) found us. the strays are the best and sweetest cats i have ever had. i am glad cats became domesticated.
Thank you for the Bengal info. I’ve read that Bengals like water; ours doesn’t. She’s just too refined. She dips that little foot of hers in it and says, no sirree, not for me! Our orange tabby (Arancia—Italian for orange) gets in between the shower curtains when we shower. The inside one is clear and he can watch without getting wet. But he watches the water at the bottom instead of us which I’m sure is a lot more interesting! Sometimes he falls in, but just climbs out.
Luna likes to jump. I have an open bookcase that is in front of a little corner of our window (I have to put my books wherever I can find a cranny). Both of our cats have emptied parts of several shelves (yes, books just come crashing down) so that they can jump and have a place to lay and watch out the window. Luna jumps all around. And she also has a longer body type. She’s very soft and is largely black with cream in between the stripes. She’s closer to a marbed pattern, but does not have well-defined rosettes.
She is our dominant cat. Arancia is mostly just a pussy-cat push-over. Although not entirely. We find that the two of them have mellowed each other some.
Many scientists believe that dogs domesticated themselves, too. The old theory was that people adopted wolf puppies, but wild wolves would have been hard to domesticate and would make bad pets. Instead, what may have happened over thousands of years is that wolves followed bands of humans around on their hunts, and hung out at their campsites, eating the discarded bones and other detritus. Over time, they became more domesticated, and man started appreciating the benefit of having a warning every time danger approached. The dogs that survived were the ones who could not only get along with humans, but understand their behavior. My dog knows when I’m going to my car; the ancient wolves would know when the Geico guys were about to go on a hunt.
Too funny!
I’ve heard some people say that they don’t entirely trust people who don’t like dogs. I agree, but I also don’t entirely trust people who don’t like cats. OK, some people are allergic to them, and some cats are pretty ornery, but there’s something wrong with anyone who isn’t moved by a furry, friendly critter of whatever sort. I’m not much for the various rodents, just because it never seemed to me like they took a lot of notice of people, but I could be wrong. Birds, reptiles,amphibians and fish mostly leave me cold.
The cat was allowed to stay but the horse never got it into his head that jumping up on the bed and licking my face in the morning was definitely not allowed.........
Oh...You mean everytime the FEED ME timer goes off.
I know two cases where a cat showed up and just decided to stay - and in both cases, eventually brought another cat-friend to stay as well. The family I knew that this happened to ended up finding a home for the second cat. But the widow I know this happened to kept both cats (and she had a dog) and then the alpha-cat broght a 3rd cat-friend to stay. I think she found another home for that one.
That's funny my dog's cat (Chew Toy) carries his weight. Of course he thinks he's a dog.
Cat’s are descendents of stranded space aliens........
Mine is mostly bengal but she is none of the above. She's not affectionate but will lie on your lap. She doesn't like to be held or carried does like to be around me. I can let her out all day on the back deck and she will not wander off. She wandered off one time last summer but I found her in front of my next door neighbor's house and scolded her all the way home. She never left the deck again.
However, she knows that I allow her to stalk any birds at the feeder which is about 25 feet off the back deck but once she makes a move on the birds, they're gone and she dashes back onto the deck.
She can't meow but rather kinda squeeks so I named her squeek. She's not playful in any way but occasionally plays with her squeeky mouse when I'm not present. For whatever reason, she is constantly putting it in her water bowl then the thing squeeks nonstop till it dries out.
She's not mischevous or destructive in any way. She is allowed on furniture but very seldom gets up on them.
She is just a good all around cat....
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