Peter delves into the science of where our feline friends came from.
Peter Neville column
A cat is shaped by its purpose, to be a hunter, and one right at the top of the food chain — from tiny Singapuras to enormous tigers! When it comes to pet cats, they are a hugely successful animal and became so after hitching a ride with man, which makes it so fascinating to explore how and why that relationship might have come about. How could such a specialised, predator become so closely attached to the lives of a primate — the human race!
SCIENTIFIC STUDY
Science has been searching for some explanations for quite some time. Fairly recent genetic studies using mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis of 979 domestic cats and their wild progenitors — the European Wild Cat, the African Wild Cat, the Central Asian Wild Cat, the sub-Saharan African Wild Cat, and the Chinese Desert Cat — suggested that each wild group represented a distinctive sub-species of the Wild Cat, Felis sylvestris.
The study also suggested that cats probably emerged in a form that was adapted to life alongside man in agricultural settlements in the Near East, but it didn’t suggest an actual mechanism as to how this remarkable process might have arisen in an animal that is so shy and reactive across its genus.
However, the technique of mtDNA analysis is not felt to be particularly accurate. Indeed, this study suggested that the five wild species’ DNA coalesced about 230,000 years ago, and the African Wild cat and pet cat around 130,000 years ago, which is greater than the archaeological evidence would suggest for man and cat living together. The first archaeological evidence of a cat-human association is found in Cyprus aged at only 9,500 years ago, but the first evidence of cats living in any definite form of harmonious relationship with man occurred only 3,500 years ago, around 1500BC in Ancient Egypt.
Evidence from archaeological studies in the region point to the African Wild Cat as being the main ancestor of the domestic cat, with the recent genetic studies now suggesting that the four other sub-species of Wild Cat may perhaps have contributed to the subsequent make-up of the pet cat along the way. African Wild Cats are frequently found today living as pets with traditional peoples across Africa, while this is not the case for the other four sub-species implicated.
RELAXED MUTATION
One explanation of the development of the cat’s relationship with man in Ancient Egypt (and our close relations ever since) has suggested that the cat is still in the middle of a process of moving from a pr
