Cats became our companions way later than you think

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq8dvdp9gn7o

by n1b0m • 8 months ago

57 49 8 months ago

bbc.co.uk

ginko2• 8 months ago

That relationship we have with cats now only gets started about 3.5 or 4,000 years ago, rather than 10,000 years ago.

I wouldn't have thought cats were domesticated 10,000 years ago, why is it implied that's a general assumption?

ggm• 8 months ago

Because other animals appear to have been domesticated 10ky ago.

It's hard to argue a good mouser is not useful to a primitive agrarian society. Which emerged before 4.5ky ago.

dmurray• 8 months ago

A John Deere tractor would be useful to a primitive agrarian society, but they didn't have one of those either.

We have plenty of evidence for domesticated cats 4,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt. We have no evidence for cats in earlier civilizations, so any assumption that they had them was a lazy guess - granted that we have fewer surviving artifacts from those eras anyway.

It's hard to prove a negative, but the recent discoveries seem to demonstrate that cats were in the middle of being domesticated in ancient Egypt. It doesn't completely rule out a line of domesticated cats in the Levant that since died out.

MangoToupe2• 8 months ago

I think a better word than "useful" in the context of cats is "tolerated". The self-domestication hypothesis ala dogs makes a lot more sense than the active domestication of livestock.

karmakurtisaani4• 8 months ago

Also, I'm pretty sure cats were domesticated way before 3.5 years ago. I think it was even as far back as, hmm, over 80 years ago.

Edit: you are correct to downvote me, it was not a good joke.

leoc• 8 months ago

There is some evidence to support this idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_the_Cat .

glimshe• 8 months ago

Have cats been domesticated as of 2025? Last time I had a cat at home 10 years ago, it felt like he domesticated me!

tokai2• 8 months ago

Because of

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1095335

toddmerrill• 8 months ago

I agree. I would guess that "most people" would think that cats were domesticated in Egypt because of their cat worship - as the article mentions. Turns out we the people were right. From the article's perspective "most people" apparently means "most scientists".

Amezarak• 8 months ago

This is often the case. In the absence of clear, overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I find it best to accept what ancient writers say. In this case, Herodotus wrote about cats in Egypt and clearly thought them a fascinating novelty. If a well-traveled Greek from Halicarnassus thought that cats required several paragraphs of description and were something he specially associated with Egypt, it would seem pretty likely that a) cat domestication occurred in Egypt based on his full description and b) domesticated cats did not spread out of Egypt until quite late.

This happens again and again because nobody can make a career out of saying "yes, Herodotus/Thucydides/Polybius/etc were right." Well, at least not until many other people spend their careers writing about how they were wrong.

One fascinating passage in Herodotus's description mentions that cats were attracted to fire and would sometimes run into them and die. My edition describes this in a footnote as a ludicrous embellishment. I agreed...until I dated a girl who told me (unprompted, never having heard this) how her pet cat had done exactly this.

wongarsu2• 8 months ago

I would guess that "most people" would think that cats were domesticated in Egypt because of their cat worship

Egyption cat worship is about on par with cat worship on the internet ca. 2005-2015. And most people on the internet don't even have grain stores that benefit from the protection of a cat. I certainly wouldn't have drawn a connection between "Ancient Egypt is long ago and they worshiped cats, thus they domesticated cats"

singularity2001• 8 months ago

Because there were cat burials at this time and they must've been very helpful for domesticated societies to get rid of vermin

ginko2• 8 months ago

There were cat burials 10k years ago?

scotty79• 8 months ago

10k was roughly invention of agriculture and cats are super useful for rodent control so there were many attempts to domesticate them since then in various parts of the world. They failed sooner or later because almost all cat species are not really consistently friendly towards humans.

Modern cats come from 4k years ago when people finally found the species of wild cat that behaved pretty much domesticated already and just dispersed it around the world.

euroderf• 8 months ago

10k was roughly invention of agriculture and cats are super useful for rodent control

Grain means storable food but also... beer.

Cats and beer.

rjsw• 8 months ago

I would guess that cats don't really help nomadic societies, dogs can.

Glemkloksdjf4• 8 months ago

In germany there is a kid book about Fridolin the little mouse.

He doesn't work and doesn't prepare for the winter and his friends do and complain to him.

After a while in their winter dominicil, Fridolin starts to talk about the sun and sky.

You know were i'm going right?

kleiba• 8 months ago

No.

wongarsu2• 8 months ago

That people need more than food and drink, they also need entertainment? And working for that is no less valuable than farming? But how is that related to cats?

I guess cats can provide companionship, which is valuable to a nomadic society. But so can dogs, and dogs have a bunch of other benefits. Cats are more useful when mice and rats start eating your food stores, and happily that's also when humans become useful to cats

oulipo2• 8 months ago

I guess cats hunt pests, so they could be useful for many early societies

sigmoid103• 8 months ago

While cats are a certified plague on wildlife, they actually suck as pest control. [1]. Mostly because they tend to go after easier prey. And animals like rats merely get more careful about showing themselves in the open, which may have led to the erroneous belief that cats lower their population.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327915473_Temporal_...

Insanity• 8 months ago

Indeed, dogs are useful. IIRC humans domesticated dogs before plants and other mammals.

I read that in “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond. It’s a good read if anyone is interested in how Eurasia got so dominant.

swader999• 8 months ago

Even a single cat takes a while to warm up to people. My ten year old tuxedo cat is always by my side or lying on me somehow but he was quite standoffish the first few years.

hypercube33• 8 months ago

My parents have a farm cat that purrs around anyone and chases them to get pets. We have no idea where he really came from he showed up quite young one day.

ghaff• 8 months ago

My neighbor had a barn cat that would come up to you and start head butting you and trying to take your food if we were eating on the deck. I'd have to periodically pick him up and take him to the other side of the house which would buy us about 10 minutes.

Another time I had summer company over and he must have sneaked in with doors opening and so forth because I found him later very comfortably situated in my bed.

LocalH• 8 months ago

It depends on the cat. My girlfriend and I have four cats between us. The youngest one was warmed up before she got here (by her choice it seems, she pounced on my girlfriend when she approached her cage in the shelter), and made herself at home within minutes.

Just like humans, cats have their own psychology and their own personalities.

I have to imagine that if a human consciousness were suddenly placed inside a cat body, the experience would rival even the deepest psychedelic experiences.

wtcactus• 8 months ago

Makes sense. Cats don’t have use for hunter-gatherer populations. Dogs do.

But when we joined into bigger and bigger agricultural based societies, cats became very handy to control pests.

I remember when I was a kid, there were these stray cats where I lived. One of them - this old scraggly looking black cat - would spend hours on the prowl, in front of a sewer right outside my parents house. When a rat came out, he would go for the kill - and for its only meal.

moi2388• 8 months ago

“ A study of bones found at archaeological sites suggests…”

Why would this be evidence? Just because Egyptians buried cats (with them) does not mean previous peoples did not have cats?

MarkusQ• 8 months ago

Bingo. I read through the whole comment thread looking for someone pointing this out.

delichon• 8 months ago

"That relationship we have with cats now only gets started about 3.5 or 4,000 years ago, rather than 10,000 years ago."

They waited until the naked apes stopped migrating around so much before starting their domestication project.

jibbit• 8 months ago

seems a bit vague to me.. not saying i know better just that i'd like more info - there a small wildcats all over europe. presumably these are older than the domestic cats? but it's well known they can be tamed from kittens, and mate with domestic cats.. why assume domestication happened once in one place?

ChrisArchitect• 8 months ago

The full study links:

The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years ago

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt2642

The late arrival of domestic cats in China via the Silk Road after 3,500 years of human-leopard cat commensalism

https://www.cell.com/cell-genomics/fulltext/S2666-979X(25)00...

Cats became our companions way later than you think

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