Cats – Part 3

The geographic chronology of cats’ semi-domestication.

As Abigail Tucker writes in her book The Lion in the Living Room: How Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World, cats trace their geographic lineage back to the areas in and around Northern Africa:

[F]rom blue- blooded Persians to mangy strays, from Manhattan’s street- smart alley cats to the ferals of the New Zealand forest, it turns out that all house cats come not from a genetic mash-up of many feline species but only from Felis silvestris. More astonishingly, they are descended solely from the lybica subspecies, the Near Eastern type native to southern Turkey, Iraq, and Israel, where it still lives today … The 11,600-year-old village of Hallan Çemi stood along the banks of a tributary of the Tigris River, in modern-day Turkey … The new human lifestyle [there] influenced far more species than just felines: in addition to the wildcats, Hallan Çemi attracted unusual numbers of other mini carnivores, like badgers and martens and weasels and, especially, foxes, all in numbers way out of proportion with their natural distribution in the food web. Such gluts of midsize hunters are actually a common feature of present- day urban zones; our towns and cities are full of raccoons, skunks, and other meat- eating pests, and in modern London red foxes are a major nuisance. A population spike of little carnivores is a called a “mesopredator release,” and these surpluses seem to happen when humans kill off the top predators in an ecosystem. Indeed, leopard and lynx bones from Hallan Çemi suggest that the villagers were successfully hunting big cats, making life easier for diminutive meat-eaters that otherwise would have been outcompeted or even consumed. Humans may not have liked these foxes and badgers and small cats either, but they might not have been worth bothering about— like suburban raccoons today. Along with offering a safe haven, the first permanent human settlements represented a revolutionary new food source. The weasels and badgers and cats invading Hallan Çemi were probably hungry. Many of the huge roasted animals there appear to have been sloppily butchered— there would have been lots of rotting meat around to steal. (“ Must have stunk to high heavens,” Zeder remarks.) For wee carnivores, this trash would have been a world- altering windfall. Sometimes the prowling, pint- size predators were captured and served up as a course themselves or skinned for their coats, but presumably the risk was worth it. So humans unwittingly welcomed a whole array of small predators. But why don’t we have badgers or foxes in our living rooms today? Of all the little wild creatures that crept across our threshold at Hallan Çemi, why did cats alone stay with us forever, becoming domesticated? … Scientists often describe the process of animal domestication as a road or pathway that animals travel— or often, are led down— over centuries, experiencing a series of profound genetic changes along the way. It’s typically a one- way street: once a wild species becomes domesticated, there’s no going back even if some individuals return to nature. A “feral” animal is not a wild animal but a domesticated stray, and its offspring are biologically similar to beasts that have never left the barnyard … A wild animal, on the other hand, may be tamed over the course of its lifetime but not domesticated— the comfort it learns to feel with humans can’t be passed along to its young. We’ve gentled lots of types of wild cats, even lions and tigers and cheetahs. But house cats are the only domesticated felines. The rewards of domestication are great. With access to our plentiful food and powerful protection, domesticated animals enjoy unprecedented reproductive success, some even surpassing ours: today there are roughly three times as many chickens (descendants of wild jungle fowl) as people on the planet, and in some countries sheep (former mouflon) outnumber us seven to one … [O]ur domestic relationship with house cats began in the same time and place as our relationship with sheep and cows and most of the rest of our important animal dependents: perhaps 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, somewhere in the Fertile Crescent at a place not unlike Hallan Çemi, though probably occurring in several spots over a prolonged period. Somehow house cats spread from there to take over the entire world. So at last we know approximately when and where cat domestication began. The remaining mystery is why and how— and ultimately, who, because it is unclear how much say humans had in the matter.

The North African wildcat appears to have had members who were more social than other feline species. As Tucker writes:

Cats, by any reasonable standard, are terrible candidates for domestication. The most obvious problem is their social lives— or lack thereof. Mankind’s basic strategy for controlling other species has typically been to hijack their dominance hierarchies, to play the role of lead steer or alpha dog so that subordinate animals fall in line and we can mate and command and kill them as we choose. But like almost all the cats (with the exception of lions and sometimes cheetahs), Felis silvestris lybica has no social hierarchy. It has no leader. In the wild, it does not even tolerate the presence of other adult cats except during copulation. Herding cats really is hard … Almost all wild cats, even those species big enough to eat humans, are, with excellent reason, shy, reclusive, and often deathly afraid of us— and that includes the several other undomesticated yet nearly identical subspecies of Felis silvestris. But the Near Eastern wildcat [also known as the North African wildcat] is a remarkable exception. Studies of modern radio- collared wild Felis silvestris lybica suggest that, while most shun humans, every so often an outlier will pursue us, prowling our pigeon houses and canoodling with our pet cats, with whom they regularly interbreed. That’s not to say that a daredevil lybica is capable of anything like the sort of affectionate behavior that we recognize in house cats; these wild animals aren’t about to snuggle with you on a Sunday morning or sit on your shoulders or request a belly rub. But personality, Driscoll explains, is a trait that can run in families, the same as milk yield or muscle quality, passed on, and sometimes amplified, through DNA. And some quirk in the natural lybica gene pool disposes particular individuals toward a certain natural bravado— a feature that would ultimately become the raw material of the cat- human bond. What we call “friendliness” in our pet cats is, in part, a lack of aggression. But it is also a lack of fear, and an inborn boldness. So it wasn’t the meek and mild cats that first entered our fire circles at Hallan Çemi and elsewhere: it was the lion- hearted. Once the most fearless felines infiltrated, they fortified themselves with our tasty leftovers and mated with other daring cats dining nearby, producing even more audacious babies. These were not domestic recruits, but invaders. And while other little predators like foxes and badgers were content to linger at civilization’s edges, where they remain today, bold cats blazed a trail all the way to our beds. In doing so, they hijacked what is normally a human- driven selection process. In effect, [Carlos] Driscoll tells me, “House cats domesticated themselves.” … The first domestic depictions of Egyptian house cats date from the Middle Kingdom, around 1950 BC. As befits a great agrarian society, many tomb frescoes show cats confronting rats. In others, cats are also seen slaying wild birds and dining on sumptuous portions of human-provided meat.

As Jonathan Losos writes in his book The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savana to Your Sofa:

[T]he scientific literature is replete with reports of cats eating rats in more natural settings. Indeed, rats are often the most common prey item of island cats. One study of feral cats in New Zealand, for example, found that rats were the staple prey item, accounting for nearly half by weight of all the food eaten; in another study, also from New Zealand, ninety-three percent of cats had eaten rats (as revealed by picking through their poops). This penchant for rativory is not a recent one: an archaeological dig from Egypt discovered the remains of a large cat with five adult rats in his stomach.

Cats’ semi-domestication was super-charged in ancient Egypt. As Losos writes:

What we can say for sure is that by about thirty-five hundred years ago, Felis catus existed as a household pet in ancient Egypt. We know that from depictions of cats as family members—under the dinner table, on boating trips to the local marsh—in paintings on tomb walls. Images of cats are almost entirely absent from Egyptian iconography before four thousand years ago. The lack of earlier evidence of domestication in Egypt or elsewhere supports the hypothesis that domestication occurred in Egypt within the last four millennia … Remember that ninety-five-hundred-year-old grave in Cyprus? The burial context and condition of the cat suggest an intimate human-cat relationship. Could this have been near the dawn of cat domestication? The fossil record and older archaeological sites reveal an absence of cats in Cyprus before eleven thousand years ago (the discovery of a cat toe bone revealed the earliest evidence of cats on the island). Consequently, the buried puss must be the descendant of cats brought there by people, probably from nearby Turkey or Syria. The combination of cats being transported overseas and treated as a treasured family possession at death suggests—at least to some—that domestication had begun almost ten thousand years ago … The next oldest notable record is a cat tooth from about eight thousand years ago, found in the settlement of Jericho. The first cat from Egypt was found at a site two thousand years younger. Like the Cyprus burial, it involved a cat buried at the foot of a human, in this case a craftsman buried with his tools and a gazelle (for sustenance in the afterlife?). Much more exciting was the discovery of six cats—two adults (a male and a female) and four kittens—in a cemetery in Hierakonpolis, Egypt, dating to fifty-eight hundred years ago. Curiously, the female was only about six months older than the kittens. Domestic cats can reproduce at six months of age, so that in itself isn’t extraordinary. However, wildcats in North Africa naturally reproduce only in the spring; hence, six-month-old wildcats would only occur in the fall, outside the breeding season. Domesticated cats, by contrast, breed year-round. Could this six-month offset be evidence that these were domestic cats? Tantalizing, but far from definitive … And that brings us to the time of the pharaohs. The ancient Egyptians are famous for their love of cats. Felines first appeared in Egyptian art, hieroglyphics, and jewelry—even the use of “miit” (the Egyptian word for cat) as a girl’s nickname—about four thousand years ago. One tomb excavation from this period revealed seventeen cat skeletons next to small pots that may have contained milk. Whether they were tamed or domesticated was not clear, but some of these cats were clearly being cared for. Starting in the reign of Thutmose III thirty-five hundred years ago, cats became very common elements in the decoration of tombs. They were often portrayed wearing collars, necklaces, and earrings; eating out of dishes; sitting lovingly under the woman of the house’s chair or occasionally in the lap of her husband; even joining the family on hunting outings in the marshes. By this time, it was clear: the domestic cat had arrived. The next fifteen hundred years were a glorious time for Egyptian cats … About three thousand years ago, the ancient city of Bubastis in the Nile delta rose to prominence, and with it, the goddess Bastet. Portrayed for the previous two millennia as a woman with the head of a lioness, Bastet’s cranium downsized from leonine to pussycat. In some sense, that wasn’t such a radical change, because determining whether a feline head in ancient Egyptian paintings and statues is meant to be a lioness or a domestic cat can often be difficult. The transition from lioness to cat may have occurred to emphasize Bastet’s protective and nurturing persona as opposed to the fierceness of the contemporary lioness-headed goddess Sekhmet. For a time, the two were viewed as opposites—fury versus friendly. Not coincidentally, Bastet’s qualities—playfulness, motherliness, fertility—are also those associated with domestic cats. Cats connected with Bastet lived the good life. Some on the temple grounds were considered the incarnate manifestation of Bastet herself; the people worshiped not the cat himself, but the goddess embodied within him. Other cats did not achieve this designation, but were treated well simply because they were members of a sacred species. Egyptian religion had many deities with animal associations, but Bastet became the most revered of them all. Beautiful bronze statues—notably the iconic upright cat sitting on its haunches—were made in industrial quantities. Family members shaved their eyebrows to mourn a cat’s passing. Enormous cat cemeteries were created for the interment of pets and temple occupants. To kill a cat was a crime potentially punishable by death.

As Tucker writes:

[C]harismatic wildlife helps explain why, around this time, the cat goddess Bastet rather abruptly transformed from a lion into a house cat. It’s a change that hints at the taming of an entire landscape. Starting around 332 BC, the Greek Ptolemies ruled Egypt for a few hundred years. The brief, fraught reign of these foreigners was a period of religious ferment and hysteria, when Egypt’s animal cults suddenly became far more prominent. Bastet and her house cats—her flesh-and-blood familiars—quickly outcompeted crocodiles and ibises and the rest of the cult animals to become perhaps the most popular devotion … Bastet, whose cult was based in the Nile city of Bubastis, had especially raucous festivals, where revelers from across the country floated into town on party barges. At their peak, these celebrations—more or less cat raves, in which worshippers danced and tore off their clothes—were attended by an estimated 700,000 people, a huge chunk of Egypt’s population. Bastet also had extravagant temples, including one smack in the middle of Bubastis, encircled by 100-foot-wide channels of flowing Nile water. Some of her temples had real catteries attached, where priests raised untold number of house cats. Ordinary pet felines throughout the kingdom basked in Bastet’s elevated status …

As Losos describes the cat experience in ancient Egypt:

Eventually the Egyptian dynasties crumbled and the Romans invaded. The old religions withered, Bastet’s star faded, and cats once again were just cats. By that time, however, the feline conquest of the world was well underway … [T]he death and subsequent mummification of so many felines was the result of the revered status of cats in ancient Egypt. During Bastet’s heyday, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians would make the pilgrimage to the great annual festival in her honor in Bubastis. And once they got there, in between Mardi Gras–like debauchery, revelers would visit the temple complex. As a way of paying homage to the goddess or requesting that a prayer be answered, pilgrims purchased mummies, which they left as votive offerings in the temple complex. Different Egyptian gods had different totemic animals; cats were the totem of Bastet, so worshippers presented mummified cats. Once a year, priests took the mummies down into the (appropriately named) catacombs for storage. Millennia later, when these subterranean galleries were excavated, the abundance of mummies was so great that tons of them were shipped to England to be ground up and used as fertilizer. In ancient times, the sale of these mummies on a vast scale may have been a moneymaking venture that supported the temple complex. So lucrative, in fact, that sometimes the cat mummies did not actually contain cats—at one site, one third of the mummies contained only mud, clay pebbles, or in one case, a mummified fish—presumably because the supply of dead cats ran short. X-ray analysis of the mummies (trigger warning!) reveals that most were either large kittens or young cats, and that they were killed by breaking their necks or by strangulation. Presumably, vast catteries existed on the temple grounds or nearby where the cats were bred and killed to produce the mummies. And Ottoni had one more safety precaution. Despite his girlfriend’s entreaties, he had not gotten a cat. Too easy to inadvertently carry modern-day cat DNA into the lab (as Ottoni pointed out to me, cat DNA is actually used as a forensic tool in criminal investigations because it is so easily transported by cat owners; one murderer was convicted largely thanks to hairs from his cat, Snowball, found on a jacket spattered with the victim’s blood).

As Losos writes, cats moved from Northern Africa, to India, China, and Japan, and through the Vikings and other seafaring people, throughout the rest of Europe:

The spread of cats from Egypt to the rest of the world is fairly well documented from archaeological sites and historical records. The Egyptians tried to prevent the export of cats, allegedly going so far as to have their armies, when on military expeditions, retrieve all captive cats in the invaded country and return them to Egypt. But it was to no avail. Sailors saw their value for rodent control and smuggled them on board. Phoenician traders plying the waters of the Mediterranean— supposedly referred to as “cat thieves” by the Egyptians— conveyed them away, as did ships from Egypt and elsewhere. Why cats were desired elsewhere is not clear. The Greeks and Romans already employed ferrets and weasels as ratters, and thus had no particular need for cats to fill that role. At least in Rome, they weren’t initially popular as pets either. It’s possible that their initial spread was solely a result of maritime activity— sailors valuing cats for their pest- control activities— which served to spread them around the Mediterranean, and then they were on their own once they abandoned ship in foreign lands. In Greece, there is evidence of cats from frescoes, jugs, cups, stone seals, and daggers going back as far as 1700 BC. Domestic cats were certainly established by the fifth century BC in Greece, if not before, and from there they quickly moved throughout much of southern Europe. The Romans then played a major role in cat dispersal to much of the continent, an interpretation based on the fact that in many areas the earliest evidence of cats is found in Roman settlements … [W]ithin a few hundred years, evidence of cats crops up in India and China. By 600 AD, they were in Japan. All were descendants of North African wildcats … Renowned for their seafaring prowess, the Norsemen brought cats along on their voyages for rodent control and—who knows?—maybe companionship. Some scientists had speculated that Vikings were the ones who brought cats to northern parts of Europe, as well as to Iceland and other islands. Ottoni’s study provided support for this idea. One of the archaeological sites in his study was a seventh-century AD Viking trading port on the Baltic Sea, in what is now Germany. Finding that the cats in this village had the same allele as Egyptian cats, Ottoni suggested the Vikings had, indeed, picked up the cats in the Mediterranean and transported them home by longship … [T]he Vikings’ relationship with felines was complex. Cats were treasured as pets and buried with their owners, but also sacrificed in religious rituals and slaughtered in great numbers for their hides, which were used for lining and trimming clothes. We know the latter from many archaeological sites with cat bones bearing cut marks produced in the skinning process, including one in Denmark from 1070 AD that contained a pit filled with remains from at least seventy cats.

As Tucker describes the same geographic journey of cats:

Ten thousand years after their ancestors invaded our Fertile Crescent settlements, house cats have spread like dandelion fluff. There are now some 600 million of these formerly obscure felines worldwide, and some scientists put the number at closer to a billion. America alone has nearly 100 million pet cats, a number that has apparently tripled in the last 40 years, and perhaps just about as many strays … Cats were also beloved by the Vikings. Feline genetics suggest that, around AD 1000, the flame-haired raiders took a shine to the orange cats they found near the Black Sea and spirited them off to outposts in Iceland, Scotland, and the Faroe Islands … But of all the empires ancient and modern, Christian and otherwise, it’s Britain, perhaps the greatest sea power the world has ever known, that gave cats their biggest boost. British ships ferried house cats to the Americas. Starving Jamestown settlers ate theirs, but that didn’t prevent cats from gaining a claw hold, and then spreading westward, where they were installed in frontier garrisons and Wild West outposts. Miners chauffeured them to California and Alaska, where they were sold for gold dust. The hope, as usual, was that cats would quell the boomtowns’ riotous invasive rodents. Confident in the cats’ rodent-routing skills, the British thoughtfully marooned cats on far-flung islands with colonial potential, including twenty on Tahiti. Perhaps the most arresting ships’ logs describe the cats’ reception on inhabited islands. Here, native people who had never seen a cat of any sort, nor guessed such creatures existed, encounter them for the first time. Nowhere is their species’ power over ours more apparent. “Our cats ... struck them with particular astonishment,” the colonial official John Uniacke wrote, after several Aborigines came aboard the HMS Mermaid, docked off Queensland in 1823. “They were ... continually caressing the cats, and holding them up for the admiration of their companions on shore.” Among the Samoans, “a passion arose for cats,” noted Titian Peale, an American explorer, “and they were obtained by all possible means from the whale ships visiting the islands.” On Ha’apai, natives stole two of Captain Cook’s “Catts.” On Eromanga, natives exchanged cords of fragrant Polynesian sandalwood for the explorers’ felines.

As Tucker writes, the spread of cats worldwide is due to their resilience, and not the sort of human coddling dogs have experienced for much longer periods of time:

[C]ats didn’t really need a welcome wagon. Wherever they disembarked, they landed on their feet. This self-reliance further distinguishes them from dogs … [I]t turns out that dogs, biologically reborn in human company and so intimately suited to our use, have a terrible time without us. It’s as though they’ve left the wild too far behind them, while cats keep a paw in both worlds, making them far more flexible and formidable invaders. Feral dogs, for one thing, are incompetent mothers. Puppies born on the street tend to die. Packs of street dogs are sustained through recruitment of new strays rather than through births. House cats, on the other hand, are doting mothers and unsurpassed breeders both in and outside of the human sphere. Females reach sexual maturity at six months of age and thereafter reproduce more like rabbits than tigers—a key ecological advantage that’s in part a function of their small size and their hyped-up reproductive cycles. And even these kittens know how to kill. Feral dogs don’t seem to pick up pack-hunting and other ancient lupine habits and depend almost entirely on garbage, which cats, while certainly enjoying a nice, easy meal of trash, can also do without, going off the grid and subsisting on their own kills. As predators, house cats have almost supernatural powers: they can see in the ultraviolet, they can hear in the ultrasound, and they have an uncanny understanding of three-dimensional space that allows them, among other things, to judge the height of sounds. They combine these distinctly feline gifts with a gastronomical flexibility that few of their relatives share. Rather than specializing, like some wild cats, in a particular chinchilla or hare, house cats hunt more than 1,000 species … [Cats’] lifestyles are similarly elastic. They can live alone, as in nature, or in groups. They can rule a thousand acres of territory or a studio apartment, roam over boulders or pick a path across traffic. They are largely nocturnal, but tailor daytime hunting excursions to prey types, temperatures, and seasons.

Cats are so self-sufficient that they have come to outnumber dogs in the world. As Tucker writes:

There are many million—perhaps up to 100 million—free-roaming cats in America today, a near-perfect shadow of the owned population, and they live everywhere from parking lots to nature preserves. Wandering dogs have been mostly eliminated from the modern American landscape, and from much of the developed world, but how to deal with roving cats—ignored for much of our mutual history—is today a mounting controversy … Commercial dog food was invented in the 1860s, but commercial cat food remained a tough sell until after World War II: it was assumed, with excellent reason, that cats could feed themselves … [C]ats are just too good at surviving. For neutering to effectively reduce stray cat numbers, it’s estimated that 71 percent to 94 percent of a given population, including virtually all of the females, need to be trapped and operated upon. Anything less and the colonies don’t shrink: intact cats can simply ramp up their reproduction until the environment again contains as many cats as it can bear. “Cats are reproductive machines,” says the Tufts University veterinarian Robert McCarthy … If you have 100 cats and you neuter 30 of them, it’s not like the problem is 30 percent better. It’s nothing. You didn’t make any progress. It’s zero percent better.”

In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore the distinctive meow, purr, and tail of the cat.