where do cats come from?

nice research on cat ancestry in the new Smithsonian magazine
here's an article from BoingBoing blogsite extraordinaire!

Housecat history

Scientists now estimate that cats were first domesticated 12,000 years ago in the Near East. According to research published last month in the journal Science, every housecat is a descendant of a Middle Eastern wildcat with the name Felis sylvestris ("cat out of the woods.") In a new online article, Smithsonian outlines what we know about the secret history of domesticated cats. From Smithsonian:

When humans were predominantly hunters, dogs were of great use, and thus were domesticated long before cats. Cats, on the other hand, only became useful to people when we began to settle down, till the earth and—crucially—store surplus crops. With grain stores came mice, and when the first wild cats wandered into town, the stage was set for what the Science study authors call "one of the more successful 'biological experiments' ever undertaken." The cats were delighted by the abundance of prey in the storehouses; people were delighted by the pest control.

"We think what happened is that the cats sort of domesticated themselves," Carlos Driscoll, one of the study authors, told the Washington Post. The cats invited themselves in, and over time, as people favored cats with more docile traits, certain cats adapted to this new environment, producing the dozens of breeds of house cats known today. In the United States, cats are the most popular house pet, with 90 million domesticated cats slinking around 34 percent of U.S. homes.

Link

posted by David Pescovitz on July 26, 2007, 03:55 PM permalink | blogs' comments

note from Dr. R-anybody who has cats could have told you that they domesticated themselves;now they are trying to domesticate US! (with limited success in most cases)

my neighbor just this morning was complaining bitterly at her own lack of understanding of cat behavior. Communication between our two species is very challenging. Cats have limited facial expressions and vocabulary and WE have a poor sense of smell!