April 14, 2018 • 21 mins
Today, we're going back to an episode about kitties in history! The human culture shift to an agricultural lifestyle started the domestication of animals. Cats naturally moved in to help with rodents.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, Happy Saturday, or in this case, Saturday. Today. We
are revisiting an episode from that covers a topic near
and dear to both of our hearts, which is kiddies.
More specifically, it's actually about how cats came to be
domesticated and live as companions to humans. I will note
that we have a couple of mentions and unearthed about
(00:24):
new developments that happened since this episode came out, so
those will not be in here. But feel free to
enjoy this show with the pet of your choice or
no pet if you are not into them. Welcome to
Stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. My name
(00:51):
is Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. 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 don't love dogs,
it's the I prefer cats. Oh, I like them both
quite a bit. Yeah, I don't have dogs. Well. I
(01:11):
think part of it is that when I was growing up,
my mother had cocker spaniels. Cocker Spaniels are crazy, some
of them, and we had cocker spaniels that bites. They
were crazy. The dogs that I had around all the
time as a child were these like high strung, neurotic
cock spaniels that ain't some cases bit we. I grew
(01:35):
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 is
so different from any other animal we've domesticated. Yeah, I
didn't notice until today. It's really pretty interesting and genetically
(01:56):
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
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
(02:18):
the United States recently, and it's mostly because of people
like me and you that 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
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 a camp, but you
do for a dog in an apartment. Like they'll there
(02:40):
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 like that are either barrel or uh
fairly tame, but like street cats that just kind of
do their thing on their own, what we call strains.
(03:02):
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, it's that often they
play with their 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, right, And
(03:23):
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 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,
(03:48):
belong in the Felis catus genus. The largest cat in
this group is the puma at one thirty pounds or
forty five and the smallest is the back 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 kims. If you google those things.
(04:10):
They are the cutest cats you've ever seen, and they
look a lot like the cats we would keep in
our homes. 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
(04:33):
the ancient Egyptians loved cats, but the belief that that's
where they 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
(04:54):
art of India. In ninety three and eight thousand year
old feel time 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
(05:18):
is an island and wild cats would be very difficult
to travel with 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
(05:40):
that boils down. So Carlos A. Driscoll, who is an
Oxford scholar that 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
(06:01):
the Phoenician home around Lebanon, not from Egypt, as we're
British cats by Rome. That fact makes the island cats
very interesting is 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
(06:24):
be um at least kind 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
(06:47):
a potential beneficial animal and then being caught and domesticated.
And if you're a cat person who's probably does not
surprise you one bit, even if you're not. The cats
were like, hey, I live here now, yeah, and the
people were like okay, yeah, So the human culture shift
from being hunter gatherers to a more agricultural lifestyle started
(07:07):
the domestication of animals. The earliest motive for breeding 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
(07:27):
agricultural societies developed. So yeah, basically graineries meant that cats
were moving into hunt rodents and it's believed that cats
were 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
(07:47):
doing this thing that society really needed. And so that
was part of their growth as a very respected and
loved animal, keeping the rats 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,
(08:08):
the artistic representation of cats in Egypt are not all
about their uses. The rodent police cats are depicted 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
(08:30):
Bastet is a woman with the head of a cat.
As an interesting side note, the Egyptian word for cat
is mao, and there's actually a breed that's recognized globally
and cat show is called an Egyptian mau, but it's
basically just saying it's an Egyptian cat, which I think
is funny. H And they're lovely cats. The exact point
of the transition from wild to domesticated in Egypt can't
(08:53):
really be pinpointed with accuracy. Logic tells us that it
would have been 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
(09:15):
and the more predatory cats as their hunters to keep
policing for rodents in the grain. 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
(09:35):
they probably were bred to be cuddly. Yeah. As a
side note, I uh, 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
(09:57):
not uncommon with rescue groups, um, because most rescues want
you to be adopting it as a family member and
not as a worker. Uh. We know that by two
thousand b C, cats were semi domesticated, but by one
thousand b C, cats, particularly in Egypt, were considered fully domesticated.
They were accustomed to being around humans, and humans had
(10:18):
a pretty friendly relationship with them. So although cats were
domesticated centuries ago. The idea of 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,
(10:41):
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 England's National Cat Club was actually
founded in eighteen eighty four. The first pedigree records in
the United States were for main coon cats in the
(11:02):
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 of dogs in American households. So,
I mean most people that you know that have cats,
they're just cats. Cats. Yeah, they get listed in your
(11:25):
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 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
(11:48):
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 entered human homes and culture versus where
wild cats are Because the skeletons of small wild cats
(12:08):
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 the same, so you can't really do that.
And even DNA testing is not always conclusive because all
(12:28):
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, awful lots who are my favorite wildcat, etcetera.
Every domestic cat is a descendant of the wildcat species,
and there are five subspecies of wildcats, and some of
(12:49):
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 the know become strays, or they've just wandered off.
The actual wild breeds are so genetically similar to house
cats that many people could not distinguish on visual alone.
(13:11):
You will see wildcats that look just like a cat
your friend has. Stephen J. O'Brien, molecular geneticist at the
National Cancer Institutes Laboratory in Frederick, Maryland, was working with
Carlos driscoll, who's graduate student at the University of Oxford,
and David McDonald, an Oxford zoologists, and others. Together they
(13:32):
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 pedigree house cats,
to feral cats, and each of the five subspecies of
wildcats to compare their DNA, and they took those from
all over the world. Uh and a Washington Post article
(13:53):
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 all over the world most closely resemble the
(14:17):
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
wildcats subspecies are in sub Saharan Africa, China, Central Asia,
and Europe, but domestic cats in Asia, for example, are
still most closely related to wildcats from the Fertile Crescent
(14:39):
rather than from the Chinese or Central Asian subspecies. So
that's pretty interesting 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
with agriculture. So other domesticated animals like cattle, pigs, horses, etcetera,
(15:03):
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.
You know, we have this animal that is seen all
over the world. Every city, every town has cats in it,
(15:26):
but they all trace back to this one place versus
versus their local wild population of Yes, 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,
(15:49):
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
(16:09):
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, and his team
have planned to follow up their two thousand seven study
with an additional study to verify or disprove this concept,
(16:33):
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 Feliss
liboca is the closest relative of all domestic cats, breeding
(16:55):
with other subspecies has led to the development of different breeds. So,
for example, men ors of the group Phelis liboca, which
is usually a leaner lie their cat 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
(17:16):
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
(17:36):
huskier appearance, So there was some mixing going on and
it's actually, this is a little bit of a side note.
I 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 breeding started
to happen in different species that we eventually turned into
pure bread. I'm using the air quotes. Pedigreed cats, uh
(17:59):
all started 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
ear mutation of the Scottish fold and the American curl.
(18:20):
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 different all
(18:43):
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,
(19:04):
they're really all very very close genetically, 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, riding
in cars and saving the day. Cats are at home
by the fire. Well. I was even startled to learn
(19:24):
that Queen Victoria had cats, because I'm kind of a
Queen 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, and I
was like, whoa, they had cats too. But I don't
think I have a favorite historical fine is I have
a favorite from recent history, which is is Coco's kitten
all ball? Oh? Yeah, who was a Manx? Yeah? And
(19:47):
that was They wondered if the reason that Coco the
Guerrilla picked a Manx for a cat is because that
kitty had no tail. Yeah, So if you don't know
about the Manx breed they have. They can have all
lengths of tales, but the breed ideal 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
(20:07):
could be drawn entirely with a series of circles, like
you want, all round 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 a room down, Tracy, I know. Well, we'll
bring it up with a little public service announcement. Please
pay a new to your path, Please do. It's super
(20:28):
important to me, super important to you. Know. We don't
need more stray animals. There are plenty of stray 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,
(20:49):
I'm a big fan of adopting rescues, although I am
always wound and like I said, blown away by the
interesting shapes and beauty and behaviors of any of the
pure bred cats. So but spaying you to your pets.
It's important take care of them. It's good for their health.
(21:11):
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
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(21:32):
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Hey, Happy Saturday, or in this case, Saturday. Today. We
are revisiting an episode from that covers a topic near
and dear to both of our hearts, which is kiddies.
More specifically, it's actually about how cats came to be
domesticated and live as companions to humans. I will note
that we have a couple of mentions and unearthed about
(00:24):
new developments that happened since this episode came out, so
those will not be in here. But feel free to
enjoy this show with the pet of your choice or
no pet if you are not into them. Welcome to
Stuff you missed in history class from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. My name
(00:51):
is Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. 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 don't love dogs,
it's the I prefer cats. Oh, I like them both
quite a bit. Yeah, I don't have dogs. Well. I
(01:11):
think part of it is that when I was growing up,
my mother had cocker spaniels. Cocker Spaniels are crazy, some
of them, and we had cocker spaniels that bites. They
were crazy. The dogs that I had around all the
time as a child were these like high strung, neurotic
cock spaniels that ain't some cases bit we. I grew
(01:35):
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 is
so different from any other animal we've domesticated. Yeah, I
didn't notice until today. It's really pretty interesting and genetically
(01:56):
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
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
(02:18):
the United States recently, and it's mostly because of people
like me and you that 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
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 a camp, but you
do for a dog in an apartment. Like they'll there
(02:40):
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 like that are either barrel or uh
fairly tame, but like street cats that just kind of
do their thing on their own, what we call strains.
(03:02):
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, it's that often they
play with their 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, right, And
(03:23):
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 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,
(03:48):
belong in the Felis catus genus. The largest cat in
this group is the puma at one thirty pounds or
forty five and the smallest is the back 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 kims. If you google those things.
(04:10):
They are the cutest cats you've ever seen, and they
look a lot like the cats we would keep in
our homes. 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
(04:33):
the ancient Egyptians loved cats, but the belief that that's
where they 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
(04:54):
art of India. In ninety three and eight thousand year
old feel time 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
(05:18):
is an island and wild cats would be very difficult
to travel with 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
(05:40):
that boils down. So Carlos A. Driscoll, who is an
Oxford scholar that 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
(06:01):
the Phoenician home around Lebanon, not from Egypt, as we're
British cats by Rome. That fact makes the island cats
very interesting is 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
(06:24):
be um at least kind 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
(06:47):
a potential beneficial animal and then being caught and domesticated.
And if you're a cat person who's probably does not
surprise you one bit, even if you're not. The cats
were like, hey, I live here now, yeah, and the
people were like okay, yeah, So the human culture shift
from being hunter gatherers to a more agricultural lifestyle started
(07:07):
the domestication of animals. The earliest motive for breeding 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
(07:27):
agricultural societies developed. So yeah, basically graineries meant that cats
were moving into hunt rodents and it's believed that cats
were 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
(07:47):
doing this thing that society really needed. And so that
was part of their growth as a very respected and
loved animal, keeping the rats 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,
(08:08):
the artistic representation of cats in Egypt are not all
about their uses. The rodent police cats are depicted 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
(08:30):
Bastet is a woman with the head of a cat.
As an interesting side note, the Egyptian word for cat
is mao, and there's actually a breed that's recognized globally
and cat show is called an Egyptian mau, but it's
basically just saying it's an Egyptian cat, which I think
is funny. H And they're lovely cats. The exact point
of the transition from wild to domesticated in Egypt can't
(08:53):
really be pinpointed with accuracy. Logic tells us that it
would have been 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
(09:15):
and the more predatory cats as their hunters to keep
policing for rodents in the grain. 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
(09:35):
they probably were bred to be cuddly. Yeah. As a
side note, I uh, 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
(09:57):
not uncommon with rescue groups, um, because most rescues want
you to be adopting it as a family member and
not as a worker. Uh. We know that by two
thousand b C, cats were semi domesticated, but by one
thousand b C, cats, particularly in Egypt, were considered fully domesticated.
They were accustomed to being around humans, and humans had
(10:18):
a pretty friendly relationship with them. So although cats were
domesticated centuries ago. The idea of 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,
(10:41):
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 England's National Cat Club was actually
founded in eighteen eighty four. The first pedigree records in
the United States were for main coon cats in the
(11:02):
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 of dogs in American households. So,
I mean most people that you know that have cats,
they're just cats. Cats. Yeah, they get listed in your
(11:25):
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 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
(11:48):
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 entered human homes and culture versus where
wild cats are Because the skeletons of small wild cats
(12:08):
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 the same, so you can't really do that.
And even DNA testing is not always conclusive because all
(12:28):
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, awful lots who are my favorite wildcat, etcetera.
Every domestic cat is a descendant of the wildcat species,
and there are five subspecies of wildcats, and some of
(12:49):
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 the know become strays, or they've just wandered off.
The actual wild breeds are so genetically similar to house
cats that many people could not distinguish on visual alone.
(13:11):
You will see wildcats that look just like a cat
your friend has. Stephen J. O'Brien, molecular geneticist at the
National Cancer Institutes Laboratory in Frederick, Maryland, was working with
Carlos driscoll, who's graduate student at the University of Oxford,
and David McDonald, an Oxford zoologists, and others. Together they
(13:32):
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 pedigree house cats,
to feral cats, and each of the five subspecies of
wildcats to compare their DNA, and they took those from
all over the world. Uh and a Washington Post article
(13:53):
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 all over the world most closely resemble the
(14:17):
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
wildcats subspecies are in sub Saharan Africa, China, Central Asia,
and Europe, but domestic cats in Asia, for example, are
still most closely related to wildcats from the Fertile Crescent
(14:39):
rather than from the Chinese or Central Asian subspecies. So
that's pretty interesting 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
with agriculture. So other domesticated animals like cattle, pigs, horses, etcetera,
(15:03):
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.
You know, we have this animal that is seen all
over the world. Every city, every town has cats in it,
(15:26):
but they all trace back to this one place versus
versus their local wild population of Yes, 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,
(15:49):
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
(16:09):
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, and his team
have planned to follow up their two thousand seven study
with an additional study to verify or disprove this concept,
(16:33):
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 Feliss
liboca is the closest relative of all domestic cats, breeding
(16:55):
with other subspecies has led to the development of different breeds. So,
for example, men ors of the group Phelis liboca, which
is usually a leaner lie their cat 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
(17:16):
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
(17:36):
huskier appearance, So there was some mixing going on and
it's actually, this is a little bit of a side note.
I 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 breeding started
to happen in different species that we eventually turned into
pure bread. I'm using the air quotes. Pedigreed cats, uh
(17:59):
all started 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
ear mutation of the Scottish fold and the American curl.
(18:20):
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 different all
(18:43):
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,
(19:04):
they're really all very very close genetically, 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, riding
in cars and saving the day. Cats are at home
by the fire. Well. I was even startled to learn
(19:24):
that Queen Victoria had cats, because I'm kind of a
Queen 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, and I
was like, whoa, they had cats too. But I don't
think I have a favorite historical fine is I have
a favorite from recent history, which is is Coco's kitten
all ball? Oh? Yeah, who was a Manx? Yeah? And
(19:47):
that was They wondered if the reason that Coco the
Guerrilla picked a Manx for a cat is because that
kitty had no tail. Yeah, So if you don't know
about the Manx breed they have. They can have all
lengths of tales, but the breed ideal 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
(20:07):
could be drawn entirely with a series of circles, like
you want, all round 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 a room down, Tracy, I know. Well, we'll
bring it up with a little public service announcement. Please
pay a new to your path, Please do. It's super
(20:28):
important to me, super important to you. Know. We don't
need more stray animals. There are plenty of stray 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,
(20:49):
I'm a big fan of adopting rescues, although I am
always wound and like I said, blown away by the
interesting shapes and beauty and behaviors of any of the
pure bred cats. So but spaying you to your pets.
It's important take care of them. It's good for their health.
(21:11):
Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a Facebook U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete. Now, so here's our current contact information. We
are at History podcast at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History. All over
(21:32):
social media that is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest,
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