Accidental Blogger

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 at Shunya’s Notes.)