The Domestication of the Cat
—Chrissie

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It has been said that cats domesticated themselves; while this statement is faithful to the animal’s personality, there is evolutionary truth to it as well. Unlike dogs, sheep, goats, and most other domesticated animals that required human influence in breeding to make them useful, the cat came to us as is, with no changes needed.

The first evidence of cats living alongside humans comes between ten and twelve thousand years ago. The modern housecat, Felis catus, is descended from African and Middle Eastern wildcat breeds, showing up exactly where we see humans first settling down into sedentary agricultural communities. Cats and humans developed a mutually beneficial relationship, likely without ever intending to do so. Stored grain and other agricultural goods attracted rodents who, in turn, attracted their predators, including Felis lybica, the ancestor of Felis catus.

The cats were welcomed as a means of pest control and became companions. Unlike most other domesticated animals, cats did not need to be bred away from a wild state by human intervention. The domestication of dogs, cattle, horses, sheep, and many other animals, can be seen in the fossil record; humans bred for particular traits so that the animals could perform particular tasks. The cat’s role in human society is an outgrowth of the animal’s natural behavior; humans just made it easier for them to find the small rodents they were already accustomed to eat. This lack of intervention means that it can be difficult for archaeologists to pinpoint the shift from wild cats hanging around human settlements to truly domesticated cats, as their skeletal structures are nearly identical. Until relatively recently, most of the selective breeding done to domesticated cats was for purely external characteristics, primarily the color, length, and pattern of the animals’ fur.

Since it can be difficult to identify domestication from evidence of the cat alone, archaeologists and historians rely on association with humans. As such, the earliest sure evidence dates to about ten thousand years ago and is in the form of a grave on the island of Cyprus containing a cat who was purposefully buried with a human. Cats of any kind are not natively found on Cyprus, which means that animal (or an ancestor) had to be brought by humans to the island.  There is consistent evidence of cat companionship since, with varying degrees of intensity. The Egyptians famously integrated the cat into their pantheon in the form of the goddess Bastet. At about the same time one sees domestication in Chinese and Japanese records, where they serve the same initial purpose of pest control in storehouses, but are also specifically cited as being useful in libraries to prevent rodents from damaging manuscripts. The early Greeks and Romans relied on not-quite domesticated weasels to act as mousers in their homes but, by the first century BCE, cats had replaced them in this role because they were better hunters of mice and more companionable.

By the European Middle Ages, there had developed an association between cats and demons and witchcraft, but the effect this had in the time is greatly overblown in modern tellings, both in fiction and by some historians. Cats were just as welcome to medieval peasant farmers as they had been in centuries previous and since. And they were certainly appreciated in more populated areas where the more concentrated build-up of waste fed rats and mice. One of the most pervading myths about cats in medieval Europe is that they were massacred during the Black Death, for fear that they caused or carried the disease; there is no evidence of this. It seems to come from a few modern texts in which medieval documents are purposefully misread and/or the author wants to make it seem as though the people of the era were so stupid as to kill the main predator of the real carrier of the disease, rats. The Catholic Church is often seen as encouraging this hatred of cats, but the opposite is true: cats were the only pets allowed in many monasteries and convents because they were useful in themselves. Also, cats are often depicted with the Holy Family in medieval art, particularly in Nativity scenes because of folklore that claims a cat labored alongside Mary in the stable.

Cats came to the Americas as the continents were colonized, again transported for their hunting prowess. As Europeans and Americans moved across the continent, cats could be a valuable commodity for homesteaders who found their stores just as vulnerable to rodents as the earliest agriculturalists did in the Fertile Crescent.

In the modern world, cats are likely more appreciated as pets than for their hunting ability, but it is doubtful that they will ever lose that instinct that brought them into humanity’s lap in the first place.