University of Leuven geneticist Claudio Ottoni worked with a large international team of researchers to analyze the mitochondrial DNA of more than 200 ancient and modern cats, spanning the past 9,000 years[14]. Ottoni and his colleagues found out that five distinct clades of ancient wildcats rapidly spread outward from relatively small origin points. Four of these clades corresponded neatly with four of the known subspecies of wildcat and dwelled in specific places: Felis s. silvestris in Europe, Felis s. bieti in China, Felis s. lybica ornata in Central Asia and Felis s. lybica cafra in southern Africa. The fifth clade, however, included not only the fifth known subspecies of wildcat – Felis s. lybica 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, Felis s. lybica lybica wildcats collected in the remote deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia were virtually indistinguishable from domestic cats. That the domestic cats grouped with Felis s. lybica 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.
Over millennia, the cat clade from Middle East began to dominate the world. Mostly this was due to the spread of agriculture. Farming practices that began in the Levant and Egypt took hold elsewhere, attracting rodents to grain stores. That, in turn, attracted wildcats, who eventually joined farming communities as companions – just as ancient dogs had joined hunting parties in the Paleolithic.
The researchers discovered that many ancient cats were spreading around the world along shipping routes. As time went on, these cats escaped in ports far from home. There, they would interbreed with local cats. Eventually, the genes of the Middle Eastern clade began to win out over others. Though these cats traveled the world with humans, they were never properly domesticated. More specifically, humans did not control their breeding. The researchers reported that house cats often mated with local wildcats. Even when cats were part of farms or ship crews, they moved between the human world and the wilderness. This might explain why domestic cats are almost identical, physically and genetically, to their wild counterparts. Furthermore, house cats show none of the typical signs of animal domestication[15] such as infantilization of facial features, decreased tooth size, and docility.
Ottoni and his colleagues found no evidence of humans breeding cats before the Middle Ages. Possibly the first human-created cat breed was the “blotched tabby” (Figure 1), a cat whose tabby stripes create whorls or spots. Blotched tabbies don’t exist in the wild and the rise of this color pattern marks an important turning point in cat domestication. For the first time in their long history of cat companionship, humans took charge of cat breeding. At that moment, cats started to become more like other domestic animals. However one important difference remains: time. While other domestic animals, like dogs and goats, have been under humans’ control for many millennia, the cat breeding has been intermittently guided by humans for less than 1,000 years.
Figure 1: A beautiful cat displaying typical tabby striping, with white underbelly and paws.
Dogs are nowadays at an advanced stage of domestication. And yet their domestication is not set in stone. The road connecting humans and dogs still has plenty of bumps in it. More than three-quarters of dogs worldwide are free-ranging animals, existing in a liminal state between wildness and domesticity. At the same time, the human-dog bond becomes stronger and stronger and there is a lot of evidence showing the increasing value humans place on this inter-species relationship. For instance, per some estimates, more than half of millennials own dogs. Also, the vast majority of dog owners consider their pets to be members of their family. Postponement of child-rearing or deciding not to have children at all may in part account[16] for these trends and, in doing so, provides further support to the notion that dogs have co-opted our caretaking impulses. Another argument in favor of this idea is the fact that women are the primary caretakers of dogs in more than 70 percent of households.
Humans are far more likely to anthropomorphize dogs than any other pet animal. And both men and women speak to dogs in what is called “doggerel.” It is a type of speech very similar to “motherese”, the baby talk we use with our infants. “I may be wrong, but I call it love – the deepest kind of love,” says a character in the book Where the Red Fern Grows. Whether or not this is ultimately true in a provable sense remains to be seen.
As for the cats, arguably, they are at the dawn of their domestication. Today’s wildcats and house cats are still virtually the same. But in 8,000 years, we might have as many breeds of domestic cats as we do dogs nowadays. We may end up with a golden retriever-sized cat with a very friendly disposition, or a baby-faced tiger, or an ultra-fluffy purse cat who looks like a kitten forever. Or maybe cats will continue to defy domestication and, instead, they would carve out a special place in the animal kingdom as the only animal to befriend us without ever falling completely under our control. Only time will tell in which direction our relationship with cats will go.