Here, Kitty Kitty: The Domestication of the Cat

The human culture shift to an agricultural lifestyle started the domestication of animals. Cats naturally moved in to help with rodents. Today, there are 600 million cats living with humans, and another estimated 600 million living independent of people.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
My name is Collie Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson,
and I feel like we should both confess up front
on this one that we both have cats. We do,
but we also love dogs. Whoops, it's not that I

(00:26):
don't love dogs, it's that I prefer cats. Oh, I
like them both quite a bit. Yeah, I don't have dogs. Well.
I think part of it is that when I was
growing up, my mother had cocker spaniels. Cocker spaniels are
crazy them and we had cocker spaniels that bit because
they were crazy. The dogs that I had around all

(00:49):
the time as a child were these like high strung,
neurotic cock spaniels that ain't some cases that we I
grew up with dogs as well. My parents bread hunting
dogs and a variety of other animals. Um, but I
have cats as an adult, And what is really fascinating
to me is the history of cat domestication because it

(01:11):
is so different from any other animal we've domesticated. I
didn't notice until today. It's really pretty interesting and genetically
it's fascinating. So just for a little bit of context
on the state of cats in the world. One third
of American households have cats, which is quite a bit
And I've read a statistic previously, but I couldn't find

(01:33):
it to back this up. But I recall at one
point in recent years someone saying that, um, the number
of cats kept as pets has actually surpassed dogs in
the United States recently, and it's mostly because if people
like me and you, they have more than one, whereas
often people will just have one dog. Well, and I
was kind of wondering about the trend of people not
wanting to buy homes and living in apartments, and often

(01:54):
it is easier to keep a cat in an apartment
than a dog. That's true. Uh, sometimes you don't have
to pay a fee to keep the apportunity for a
dog in an apartment, like they'll there will be an
additional writer, So that makes sense. There are an estimated
six hundred million cats living with humans around the world
and another estimated six hundred million living independent of people

(02:15):
like that are either farrell or h fairly tame, but
like street cats that just kind of do their thing
on their own, what we call strains, and because cats
are independent and their predators. I mean, we've all seen
cats talk their prey. They kind of get vilified a
little bit in some cultures. Well, and it's not just
that their predators, that's that often they play with their

(02:37):
prey in a way that seems cruel to people. Yeah,
there's it does seem evil if you've ever seen a
cat kind of play with a thing that is trying
to get away from it. And so as a consequence,
they've been portrayed as you know, the familiars of supervillains,
and they have been associated with doubles and sorcery, but
overall they still have a pretty okay standing. Cats are

(02:59):
divided into three genera. There are the great cats, which
are lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, cheetahs get their own, and
then small cats all house cats belong in the Felis
Catis genus. The largest cat in this group is the
puma at one to one and thirty pounds or forty

(03:19):
fives and the smallest is the black footed cat of
the Calahari Desert in Southern Africa, which is between two
and a half and four and a half pounds or
one to two kgrams. If you google those things. They're
the cutest cats you've ever seen, and they look a
lot like the cats we would keep in our homes.

(03:39):
They are and there's a reason for that. So we're
focusing today on that third group and how members of
Felis Catis became domesticated. For a long time, it's been
believed that the ancient Egyptians were the first people to
domesticate cats. There's certainly lots of evidence that the ancient
Egyptians loved cats, but the belief that that's where they

(04:01):
came from has shifted a little bit thanks to more
recent genetic studies. The earliest artistic representations of cats that
we found have been in ancient Egypt, on crete in
Cyprus and in some areas of the Orient, and there
are also cat statues in some of the ancient art
of India. In nineteen eighty three, and eight thousand year

(04:22):
old feline jaw bone was found on the island of Cyprus.
A site fifteen hundred years earlier than that was discovered
on Cyprus in two thousand four where a cat had
been buried with a human and it was very clearly
like that they had been buried together, uh not that
he happened to be adjacent. And since Cyprus is an
island and wildcats would be very difficult to travel with

(04:45):
on a boat, it stands to reason that cats were
actually domesticated before they got there, as they are not
believed to be a native species to Cyprus. So people
would have gotten the cats to be more manageable and
then taken them with a boat to Cyprus because they
were not already cats on Cyprus. Correct how that boils down.
So Carlos A. Driscoll, who is an Oxford scholar that

(05:07):
will talk about a lot more shortly because he's done
a lot of work in the area of cat genetics
in their history, he has stated the following on this quote.
The going hypothesis is that cats were brought there, meaning
to Cyprus, very early on in the domestication process, by
Phoenician traders and settlers, directly from the Phoenician home around Lebanon,

(05:27):
not from Egypt, as we're British cats by Rome. That
fact makes the island cats very interesting, as they may
represent a sort of proto domestic cat, so, as you said,
tame enough that they could be handled, managed and put
on a ship of people. If you've ever tried to
handle a feral cat, you know, it's super tricky. So
they really would have to be um at least kind

(05:50):
of used to people. Yeah, especially because then you're getting
in a boat. Yeah. And what makes the domestication of
cats unique is that they likely chose to live with humans.
They saw a benefit to themselves, and so they kind
of moved into human culture rather than being identified as
human by humans as a potential beneficial animal and then

(06:12):
being caught and domesticated. And if you're a cat person,
that's probably does not surprise you one bit, even if
you're not. The cats were like, hey, I live here now, yeah,
when people were like okay, Yeah, So the human culture
shift from being hunter gatherers to a more agricultural lifestyle
started the domestication of animals. The earliest motive for breeding

(06:34):
animals was as a food source, but that was not
not cats don't really do that now. They are not
really made to be food. They're very small, but they're
great in vermin management, so they naturally assumed that role
as agricultural societies developed. So yeah, basically, graineries meant that

(06:55):
cats were moving into hunt rodents and it's believed that
cats are probably really welcomed by the early farmers for
this helpful service. Uh. And this actually maybe how egypt
Camp came to really revere the cat, like they recognized
that of their own volition, cats were just coming in
and doing this thing that society really needed, and so
that was part of their growth as a very respected

(07:17):
and loved animal, keeping the wraths out of the grain.
And some evidence actually suggests that the Ethiopians were the
ones that brought cats into Egypt after they conquered the Nubians,
which is the whole other area of history that I
would like to do more podcasts on. As we know,
the artistic representation of cats in Egypt are not all
about their use as the rodent police. Cats are depicted

(07:37):
as part of family life and they're pampered and even
adorned with jewels. The penalty for killing a cat in
ancient Egypt was death. There have even been discoveries of
special cat cemeteries in Egypt. And lastly, the Egyptian protector
goddess Basta is a woman with the head of a cat.
As an interesting side note, the Egyptian word for cat

(07:59):
is mao and there's actually a breed that's recognized globally
in catsh it's called an Egyptian mow, but it's basically
just saying it's an Egyptian cat, which I think is funny. Uh,
And they're lovely cats. The exact point of the transition
from wild to domesticated in Egypt can't really be pinpointed
with accuracy. Logic tells us that it would have been

(08:20):
a gradual process, with each generation of cats living alongside
people becoming more and more tame. And there's also a
theory that breeding really began around this time with cats,
so that they were they kind of forked the cat population.
They were breeding the wilder cats and the more predatory
cats as their hunters to keep policing for rodents in

(08:42):
the green, and then they were also probably breeding the
more docile cats together to create house cats that would
be you know, part of their family in their households
and maybe also keeping their rodents out of the inside.
Yeah that's always a benefit. But they probably were bred
to be cuddly. Yeah. As a side note, I uh,

(09:04):
my cats have mostly been rescues um and I remember specifically,
you know, because this whole idea of cats being good
at handling rodent rodents is so prevalent that I have
often had to sign a thing saying that I'm not
getting this cat to be a mouser, getting this cat
to be a companion. Yeah. Yeah, that's not uncommon with
rescue groups. Um, because most rescues want you to be

(09:24):
adopting it as a family member and not as a worker. Uh.
We know that by two thousand BC, e cats were
semi domesticated, but by one thousand BC, cats, particularly in Egypt,
were considered fully domesticated. They were accustomed to being around
humans and humans had a pretty friendly relationship with them.
So although cats were domesticated centuries ago, the idea of

(09:47):
a pedigree is still pretty young. That probably started in
England sometime in the mid to late nineteenth century. Queen
Victoria owned two blue Persians, which is believed to be
one of the things that gave the cat a reputation
for being a perfectly respectable pet, and the first cat
show took place in London in eighteen seventy one, and

(10:09):
England's National Cat Club was actually founded in eighteen eighty four.
The first pedigree records in the United States were for
Maine coon cats, in the mid eighteen hundreds. This breed
is still one of the most popular in America. It
is they're beautiful. But even with the popularity of pedigree cats,
it's estimated that less than ten percent of cats in
American households are pure bred, compared to more than fifty

(10:32):
of dogs in American households. So, I mean most people
that you know that have cats, they're just cats. It's
domestic cats. Yeah, they get listed in your vet records
as domestic short hair because they usually are just mixes. Uh.
You know. Uh, different cities are trying to control their
feral populations different ways, but a lot of times rescue
groups will scoop them up and socialize them and adopt

(10:53):
them out. So there really isn't any uh knowledge of
their lineage and where they came from. So how did
we get from wild animals to fluffy lap friends all
over the world. Uh, well, this is interesting from a
genetic standpoint. We have had sort of a startling revelation
about it. Um, it's really hard to track where cats

(11:17):
entered human homes and culture versus where wild cats are
because the skeletons of small wild cats and our domestic
cats are virtually identical. They're really hard to tell apart,
so you can't really contextualize, Like, if you find a
cat in ruins, it could have wandered in later, it
could have been part of the thing. We don't know.
It looks like a wild cat, well, they all look

(11:39):
the same, so you can't really do that. And even
DNA testing is not always conclusive because all cats have
really similar genetics. There are thirty seven species in the
family Fella day. That's everything from a pet cat to lions, tigers,
auslots who are my favorite wildcat, etcetera. Every domestic cat
is a descend of the wildcat species, and there are

(12:02):
five subspecies of wildcats, and some of those are almost
completely indistinguishable from you know, your non pedigree pet cats.
And this is not a situation where the domestic cats
have gotten free and reverted to becoming feral, or they've
you know, become strays, or they've just wandered off. The
actual wild breeds are so genetically similar to house cats

(12:23):
that many people could not distinguish on visual alone. You
will see wildcats that look just like a cat your
friend has. Stephen J. O'Brien molecular geneticist at the National
Cancer Institute's laboratory in Frederick, Maryland, was working with Carlos Driscoll,
who's graduate student at the University of Oxford, and David McDonald,

(12:44):
an Oxford zoologists, and others. Together, they conducted a study
in two thousand seven in which they took blood and
tissue samples from all kinds of cats, from the pure
bred house cats to non pedigreed house cats to feral cats,
and each of the five subspecies of wild cats to
compare their DNA, and they take those from all over

(13:07):
the world. Uh in a Washington Post article about the
study stated, quote, the findings drawn from an analysis of
nearly one thousand cats around the world suggested that the
ancestors of today's Tabby's, Persians and Siamese wandered into Near
Eastern settlements at the dawn of agriculture. They were looking
for food, not friendship. The researchers found that domesticated cats

(13:29):
all over the world most closely resemble the Libica subspecies
that comes from the Near East. This is significant because
it shows that it's not a case of any given
regions simply taming their local wildcats. The other wild cats
subspecies are in sub Saharan Africa, China, Central Asia, and Europe,
but domestic cats in Asia, for example, are still most

(13:51):
closely related to wild cats from the Fertile Crescent rather
than from the Chinese or Central Asian subspecies. So that's
pretty interesting, uh, to know that somehow those cats that
started in you know, kind of the cradle of civilization
are the cats that really populated the world. They weren't
just regionally adapting. They were getting sent around and spreading

(14:14):
with agriculture. So other domesticated animals like cattle, pigs, horses, etcetera,
all have more diverse genetic profiles, so they were being
bred and domesticated in multiple different places. But it seems
like the domestic cats seems to have come almost entirely
from the Near East, which is really startling to think about.

(14:35):
You know, we have this animal that is seen all
over the world. Every city, every town has cats in it,
but they all trace back to this one place versus
versus their local wild population of It's pretty fascinating. Evolutionary
biologists at the University of California in Los Angeles, Robert
Wayne told The Washington Post that quote when the technology

(14:58):
which means agriculture development, grain storage, etcetera. Was trans transferred
to other cultures, so were the cats. So he's suggesting
that his cultures taught one another about how to raise
grain and store it. They were also including cats as
part of that package. Yeah, it's like saying, Okay, here's
the best way to do this and the best way

(15:18):
to store this, and you're gonna want some cats, we
have some for you. Uh. So they were spreading culturally
with knowledge. I love that. It's like passing on your
early tomato seeds, except with a living, breathing responsibility. Yeah. Uh.
And Carlos Driscoll, who we mentioned earlier in his team
have planned to follow up their two thousand seven study
m with an additional study to verify or disprove this concept.

(15:42):
But I haven't found any published stuff that deals with
it yet. Also of note on the two thousand seven
study is that there was genetic evidence of domesticated and
wildcat hybrids. Wild and non wild cats are so closely
related that they can easily mix. So even though Felis
libbaca is the closest relative of all domestic cats, breeding

(16:04):
with other subspecies has led to the development of different breeds. So,
for example, members of the group peliss Limbaca, which is
usually a leaner lie their cap adapted to desert living,
are believed to have mated with Phelis sylvestris, which is
a stockier subspecies that's common in western and Central Europe,
to have created kind of the cobbier breeds that have

(16:25):
since been refined through pedigree breeding, like a British short
hair or a Manx or a char true. If you
look at any of those show cats, you know, pure
bred show cats, they're thicker and heavier, and they don't
look the same as uh, you know, kind of the
leaner like an Abyssinian or any of the kind of
lithe breeds. They have like a little bit of a

(16:45):
huskier appearance. So there was some mixing going on, and
it's actually, this is a little bit of a side note,
a believe that cats were first brought to Britain which
probably catalyzed some of that breeding by the Romans around
ten CE, and so that's when this cross readings started
to happen in different species that we eventually turned into
pure bread. I'm using the air quotes pedigreed cats, uh

(17:08):
all started it all catalyzed right there. Various mutations and
cross breedings have occurred that give us the assortment of
pedigreed cat breeds that there are today. So Siamese cats
and Burmese are the results of an albino series mutation.
Rex breeds have a curly hair mutation, the hairless sphinx
and the your mutation of the Scottish fold and the

(17:28):
American curl. All of these come from breeding and mutation. Yeah.
And if you ever want like a fascinating walk down
like breed specifics and mutations that have purposely been retained
through breeding, go to a cat show. It's one of
my favorite things. I do at least one every year
because I think people that have never been to one,
and they've only been around like you know, your regular
house cat, they're a little bit blown away by how

(17:51):
different all of these cats sort of look and how
they've been and how they behave a lot of them
have deeply different behaviors. Yeah, but it all started in
the same place, which is genetically they are also close.
I mean, they're tiny little changes in their genetic code
that create all of these very different looking breeds. But
at their base, they're really all very very close genetically,

(18:15):
and it all came from the fertile crescent. Do you
have Do you have a favorite historical cat? That's tricky?
You hear a lot more about people's dogs in history,
you think cats because often, you know, dogs are out
with people in the day, cats are at home by
the fire. Well. I was even startled to learn that
Queen Victoria had cats, because I'm kind of a Queen

(18:36):
Victoria nerd, but you always hear about her and her dogs,
and this doing research for this is actually the first
time I heard about her cats. They're like, whoa, they
had cats too. But I don't think I have a
favorite historical Mine is I have a favorite from recent history,
which is is Coco's kitten all Ball? Oh yeah, who
was a Manx? Yeah, and that was They wondered if

(18:57):
the reason that Cocoa the gorilla to Max for a
cat as because that kitty had no tail. Yeah, So
if you don't know about the Max breed they have.
They can have all lengths of tails, but the breed
ideal is to have no tail, so they do look
kind of like little balls. The breed standard. If you
go to a show. One of the things that they're
looking for is that the cat could be drawn entirely
with a series of circles like you want, all round

(19:19):
shapes about its body. So it would make sense that
Coco identified it as a ball, which is very sweet. Uh,
it's a sad story. Way to bring the room down, Tracy,
I know. Well, we'll bring it up with a little
public service announcement. Please stay near your bath. Please do
super important to me, super important to you. Know, we
don't need more stray animals. There are plenty of stray

(19:42):
cats in the world. That being pretty much all of
the cats I have ever had in my life have
either have either been rescues or strays that we're taken in.
They would have become strays had I not taken them in. Yeah,
I'm a big fan of afting rescues, although I am
always wound and like I said, blown away by the

(20:05):
interesting shapes and beauty and behaviors of any of the
pure bread cats. So, but spaining you to your pets,
it's important take care of them. It's good for their health.
I believe you also have some mail to read. I do.
Our Happy Birthday episode has gotten so much mail, which
is all cool. Uh, And I have a couple that
I want to read. One is from our listener Mike,

(20:28):
and he is from St. Louis and he says, ladies.
I was catching up on the podcast and while listening
to the Happy Birthday to You podcast, you mentioned the Simpsons.
That would be me. I always mentioned the Simpsons. You
said that the Simpsons did a different version so they
wouldn't have to pay a license fee. On at least
two occasions, Happy Birthday to You has been performed on
the show. One time was just the first line where

(20:48):
Mr Smithers has a thought about Mr Burns popping out
of a cake and singing it to him. I remember that.
Two their time was when one of my favorite bands
from my misspent youth, the Ramones, played it for Mr Burns.
This was alded in one of the best lines ever,
which was have the Rolling Stones killed? I love Mr
Burns have a cat named after him, so we've made
it semantic. Uh, yes, of course, you're absolutely right, and

(21:09):
I had forgotten about those. I was just speculating. The
one that I was referring to is when they go
to a children's pizza amusement kind of establishment and they
have it's kind of based on the old Chucky cheese
and show biz pizza and all of those kinds of
things that were popular more popular I think when I
was younger. Some of them still exist. But they had

(21:30):
the big animatronic animals that did the You're the Birthday,
You're the and that's in one of them's head popped aftors.
Horrifying and wonderful. There's the one where Mo turns Mose
into a family restaurant. He's turned Mose into many things,
you know when those are like a postmodern um experimental
bar well, and in this one he had to sing
a song with the French brie basket on his head.
Oh yes, yeah, yeah. So the Simsons, I mean, if

(21:53):
any show can afford to Bay licensing on Happy Birthday,
it's them. And I was just not thinking about those,
So thank you mine for that correction. I love me
some Simpsons. Our next letter, also about Happy Birthday, is
from our listener Novella, and she says it's a trip
to know that Happy Birthday is Cylinder copyright. One thing
I couldn't help wondering during the whole podcast is whether

(22:14):
or not Marilyn Monroe had to pay to use the
song referencing the famous singing of her when she sang
it very um way to the President, which is also
what Mr Burns was spoofing when he came out of
the cake against Mr Smither's fantasy. There were many people
who were wondering this while we were doing that episode.
Uh Novella says, were there any ramifications of her singing

(22:37):
a copyrighted song, especially especially in such a gasp sensuous manner?
And I couldn't find any hard evidence online. So what
I did is I went to a lawyer and asked
them what they thought. And it's a person that I
know who is not practicing, but she's licensed, and her
kind of knowledge area of expertises copyright and intellectual property
and her thinking. And I also found another lawyer online

(22:58):
that kind of was of the same mindset. Is that
large venues like Madison Square Garden, which is where that
performance happened, have a blanket as cap license and they
basically just get a bill every month for usage of
any license music. And so it probably showed up somewhere
as a line item on a bill and it got
paid without a thought. And it's never really been recorded

(23:19):
in history as Maryland paid for this, it probably was
just a matter of simple paperwork. It took place at
Madison Square Garden. There were many, many, many many people
in attendance, so it was definitely a public performance and
it was broadcast. Yes, And while like she did kind
of adapt it a little bit to be seductive, it's
still pretty much follows. It's a Spilis version of So

(23:43):
that is what we discovered about Happy Birthday in Marylyn
Arote because many people did write us, and yes, we
got lots of letters. Yeah, so that's that's what we learned,
is that it's probably just somewhere in an accountant's ledger,
paid for and done. So that's the scoop. If you
would like to write us about Happy Birthday or cats

(24:04):
or anything else, you can do so at History Podcast
at Discovery dot com. We're also on Twitter at missed
in History and on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash
history class Stuff. You can find us on Tumbler at
missed in History dot tumbler dot com, and on pinterest.
Uh and if you would like to learn more about
today's topic, you can go to our website and type

(24:25):
in the word domestication and you will come up with
how animal domestication works. If you would like to learn
about that or any other subject that you can come
up with, you should come and do that at our website,
which is how stuff Works dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff
Works dot com. Netflix streams TV shows and movies directly

(24:59):
to your home say bing you time, money, and hassle.
As a Netflix member, you can instantly watch TV episodes
and movies streaming directly to your PC, Mac, or right
to your TV with your Xbox three, sixty P S
three or Nintendo we console plus Apple devices, Kindle and Nook.
Get a free thirty day trial membership. Go to www

(25:19):
dot Netflix dot com and sign up now.