The cat’s out of the bag

If your cat were a person, you’d have parted ways long ago. Few species in history have been so pampered, for so little return. How did we get here, our emotions batted away with a gentle paw, precious artefacts flicked off every surface, our affections still intact?

Cats were first domesticated about 10,000 years ago, just as humans were beginning to practise settled agriculture. That’s a lot later than the domestication of dogs, which is said to have begun about 23,000 years ago.

Dogs were all the friend humans needed in those early years: a loyal beast to guard a cave or campsite; help with hunts; protect the young and infirm. The shift to agriculture, however, meant that rodents became a menacing threat. How was one to protect the fields, the stores, the produce?

Wild cats first stalked into human settlements at this stage, hunting the pests that were their natural prey, says a study on the genetic diversity of modern cat populations, conducted by feline geneticist Leslie A Lyons of the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine and published in the journal Nature in November.

The earliest domestication occurred in many patches of early human civilisation, from the Yangtze Plain in China to the Indus Valley in the Indian subcontinent. By 5,000 BCE, they had found a place in temple carvings and pharaohs’ tombs in Egypt. Thousands of years later, they found pride of place on ships, where they were vital in their role of pest-destroyers.

They travelled widely with explorers and imperialists. As a result, domestic cats in Australia, the Americas, Tunisia and Kenya bear strong genetic links with strains from Western Europe, Lyons found. (Cats in India and Sri Lanka have a much more mixed ancestry, suggesting that their ancestors had also roamed the land and maritime Silk Road routes.)

Today, cats still hunt; come and go as they please; fend for themselves. We haven’t really changed the behaviours of cats that much, the study states.

Perhaps that’s where it comes from, then, that innate sense cats seem to have, that you need them more than they’ve ever needed you.