New Evidence on Domestication of Cats

(Image: Bastet, from the Louvre Museum, 26th Dynasty, 664 - 332 BCE) It's a lengthy article. Here are the key points summarized neatly at Scientific American Online:

• Unlike other domesticated creatures, the house cat contributes little to human survival. Researchers have therefore wondered how and why cats came to live among people.
• Experts traditionally thought that the Egyptians were the first to domesticate the cat, some 3,600 years ago.
• But recent genetic and archaeological discoveries indicate that cat domestication began in the Fertile Crescent, perhaps around 10,000 years ago, when agriculture was getting under way.
• The findings suggest that cats started making themselves at home around people to take advantage of the mice and food scraps found in their settlements.

From the June 2009 Scientific American Magazine The Evolution of House Cats By Carlos A. Driscoll, Juliet Clutton-Brock, Andrew C. Kitchener and Stephen J. O'Brien It is by turns aloof and affectionate, serene and savage, endearing and exasperating. Despite its mercurial nature, however, the house cat is the most popular pet in the world. A third of American households have feline members, and more than 600 million cats live among humans worldwide. Yet as familiar as these creatures are, a complete understanding of their origins has proved elusive. Whereas other once wild animals were domesticated for their milk, meat, wool or servile labor, cats contribute virtually nothing in the way of sustenance or work to human endeavor. How, then, did they become commonplace fixtures in our homes? Scholars long believed that the ancient Egyptians were the first to keep cats as pets, starting around 3,600 years ago. But genetic and archaeological discoveries made over the past five years have revised this scenario—and have generated fresh insights into both the ancestry of the house cat and how its relationship with humans evolved. Cat’s Cradle The question of where house cats first arose has been challenging to resolve for several reasons. Although a number of investigators suspected that all varieties descend from just one cat species—Felis silvestris, the wildcat—they could not be certain. In addition, that species is not confined to a small corner of the globe. It is represented by populations living throughout the Old World—from Scotland to South Africa and from Spain to Mongolia—and until recently scientists had no way of determining unequivocally which of these wildcat populations gave rise to the tamer, so-called domestic kind. Indeed, as an alternative to the Egyptian origins hypothesis, some researchers had even proposed that cat domestication occurred in a number of different locations, with each domestication spawning a different breed. Confounding the issue was the fact that members of these wildcat groups are hard to tell apart from one another and from feral domesticated cats with so-called mackerel-tabby coats because all of them have the same pelage pattern of curved stripes and they interbreed freely with one another, further blurring population boundaries. In 2000 one of us (Driscoll) set out to tackle the question by assembling DNA samples from some 979 wildcats and domestic cats in southern Africa, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and the Middle East. Because wildcats typically defend a single territory for life, he expected that the genetic composition of wildcat groups would vary across geography but remain stable over time, as has occurred in many other cat species. If regional indigenous groups of these animals could be distinguished from one another on the basis of their DNA and if the DNA of domestic cats more closely resembled that of one of the wildcat populations, then he would have clear evidence for where domestication began. In the genetic analysis, published in 2007, Driscoll, another of us (O’Brien) and their colleagues focused on two kinds of DNA that molecular biologists traditionally examine to differentiate subgroups of mammal species: DNA from mitochondria, which is inherited exclusively from the mother, and short, repetitive sequences of nuclear DNA known as microsatellites. Using established computer routines, they assessed the ancestry of each of the 979 individuals sampled based on their genetic signatures. Specifically, they measured how similar each cat’s DNA was to that of all the other cats and grouped the animals having similar DNA together. They then asked whether most of the animals in a group lived in the same region. The results revealed five genetic clusters, or lineages, of wildcats. Four of these lineages corresponded neatly with four of the known subspecies of wildcat and dwelled in specific places: F. silvestris silvestris in Europe, F. s. bieti in China, F. s. ornata in Central Asia and F. s. cafra in southern Africa. The fifth lineage, however, included not only the fifth known subspecies of wildcat—F. s. lybica in the Middle East—but also the hundreds of domestic cats that were sampled, including purebred and mixed-breed felines from the U.S., the U.K. and Japan. In fact, genetically, F. s. lybica wildcats collected in remote deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were virtually indistinguishable from domestic cats. That the domestic cats grouped with F. s. lybica alone among wildcats meant that domestic cats arose in a single locale, the Middle East, and not in other places where wildcats are common. (Emphasis added). Rest of article. Excerpts:

• To get a bead on when the taming of the cat began, we turned to the archaeological record. One recent find has proved especially informative in this regard. In 2004 Jean-Denis Vigne of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and his colleagues reported unearthing the earliest evidence suggestive of humans keeping cats as pets. The discovery comes from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where 9,500 years ago an adult human of unknown gender was laid to rest in a shallow grave. An assortment of items accompanied the body—stone tools, a lump of iron oxide, a handful of seashells and, in its own tiny grave just 40 centimeters away, an eight-month-old cat, its body oriented in the same westward direction as the human’s. Because cats are not native to most Mediterranean islands, we know that people must have brought them over by boat, probably from the adjacent Levantine coast. Together the transport of cats to the island and the burial of the human with a cat indicate that people had a special, intentional relationship with cats nearly 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. This locale is consistent with the geographic origin we arrived at through our genetic analyses. It appears, then, that cats were being tamed just as humankind was establishing the first settlements in the part of the Middle East known as the Fertile Crescent.
• Although the exact timeline of cat domestication remains uncertain, long-known archaeological evidence affords some insight into the process. After the Cypriot find, the next oldest hints of an association between humans and cats are a feline molar tooth from an archaeological deposit in Israel dating to roughly 9,000 years ago and another tooth from Pakistan dating to around 4,000 years ago. Testament to full domestication comes from a much later period. A nearly 3,700-year-old ivory cat [c. 1700 BCE] statuette from Israel suggests the cat was a common sight around homes and villages in the Fertile Crescent before its introduction to Egypt. [Baloney!] This scenario makes sense, given that all the other domestic animals (except the donkey) and plants were introduced to the Nile Valley from the Fertile Crescent. But it is Egyptian paintings from the so-called New Kingdom period—Egypt’s golden era, which began nearly 3,600 years ago [c. 1500 BCE - after the Hyksos were kicked out rulership]—that provide the oldest known unmistakable depictions of full domestication. These paintings typically show cats poised under chairs, sometimes collared or tethered, and often eating from bowls or feeding on scraps. The abundance of these illustrations signifies that cats had become common members of Egyptian households by this time.

[Well known associations of the lion with the ancient Egyptian Sun God, RA, and the association of the lioness or lion-headed goddess as one of the "Eyes of Ra" - Sekhmet, an aspect of equally ancient Goddess Het-Hert (Hathor) indicate a much older association between the ancient Egyptians and cats. As far as I am aware, both of these deities pre-date the founding of the dynastic period in ancient Egypt, c. 3500-3400 BCE and are therefore at least 5500 to 5400 years old, and quite possibly older. See, for instance, this information from the Louvre Museum indicating that the bones of a cat were discovered in a predynastic tomb dating to around 4000 BCE - that is, about 6000 years ago].

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For information on the Egyptian cat Goddess, Bast or Bastet, see: Tour Egypt, The Gods of Ancient Egypt - Bast Per-Bast.org For information on the importance of the cat in ancient Egypt (this would extend to any country where grain and other crops subject to the ravages of mice and rat infestations were a problem), see: Wikiland Mythology: Why were cats important in ancient Egypt? One of the key points I gleaned from this information is that the ancient Egyptians called cats "miu" or "miut" ("he or she who mews" - the "t" sound or glyph at the end of Egyptian words often designated a female) for the "meowing" sound that they made! That article cited above I found at the Louvre Museum says that "'The Ancient Egyptian word for cat was "mau", an onomatopoeia for mewing.' " Onomatopoeia is just a fancy word for this definition (from my trusty Webster's Collegiate Dictionary: "the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it."