The mouse and the pussycat

Domestic cats and house mice go together like, well… Tom and Jerry. And now, biologists have found that these archetypal arch enemies have an intimate evolutionary history going back many thousands of years.

It is pretty well established that the house mouse – one of the most successful invasive species on the planet – originated in southern Asia when humans started adopting sedentary agricultural cultures reliant on the storage of grains. The suspicion has long been that the domestication of the African wild cat was driven by humans’ need to protect their precious larders from the rapacious rodents.

An international team of scientists has now used genetic and archaeological evidence to provide some firm evidence for that theory. They’ve shown that, as the mice have spread to human settlements around the world, the cats have soon followed.

The research suggests that people probably first started using cats to control the rodents somewhere in the Near East about 15,000 years ago. Five thousand years later, both species appeared in Cyprus and then started colonising continental Europe simultaneously about 4,000 years ago.

Meanwhile, it’s probably fair to assume that these ancestral moggies had a better success rate than poor old Tom.

FIND OUT MORE

Scientific Reports:

The game of cat and mouse has been playing out for thousands of years. SB go.nature.com/2YMLNw3