RECENT RESEARCH CHALLENGES THE CONVENTIONAL VIEW ON HOW CATS BECAME DOMESTICATED
It might be a stretch to call a house cat tamed. Cats are known for being aloof and having erratic moods, yet they have never fully given up their wild side. Despite their legendary temperament and, at best, their ability to put up with us, our feline companions play a significant role in the lives of many families worldwide. In their own right, cats are just as fascinating and endearing.
According to recent studies, cats may have been domesticated in ancient Egypt due to their association with ceremonial sacrifice. The practice is explained by two studies. Because mummified cats were so frequently offered as sacrifices to Egyptian gods, the ancient Egyptians began breeding them to meet demand, ultimately resulting in the domestication of cats. The idea is that because the cats were bred together, there were finally fewer feral kittens.
This argument contradicts a widely accepted theory that cats domesticated themselves in Europe during the Neolithic era. A surplus of rodents that consumed crops resulted from the development of agricultural techniques and farming by human communities. Therefore, as an early method of pest management, overburdened farmers probably promoted a greater feline population close to their communities.
This Neolithic self-domestication theory seemed to be confirmed in the early 2000s by the discovery of a 9,500-year-old burial in Cyprus that contained human and feline remains. However, research on cat morphology and genetic analysis may refute this notion in the two publications that are currently pending peer review.
Sean Doherty and his colleagues at the University of Exeter conducted a study in which they analysed the bones of African wildcats, domestic cats, and European wildcats. They discovered that there was no discernible difference in the resemblance between domestic cats and either European or African wildcats. These results cast doubt on the European Neolithic domestication theory, but they also raise new issues.
By examining the genetic evolution of the domestic cat, Felis catus, the other study might start to address these issues. Paleogeneticist Marco De Martino of the University of Rome Tor Vergata studied the genetic information of 70 cat genomes from Anatolian, Bulgarian, Italian, and North African ancient sites. The findings pinpoint North Africa as the likely point of origin for the domestic cat species, “several millennia later” than the Neolithic period.
The development of the cult of the Egyptian goddess Bastet parallels this study. A lion's head was used to represent Bastet when it "first appeared in the third millennium BCE," but over time, an African wildcat head took its place. The rise in mummified cat sacrifices, which were presented to the goddess in ceremonies, paralleled this development.
Even though some people still maintain that cats were domesticated much earlier than the ancient Egyptian idea suggests, the matter may never be resolved due to a lack of information and archaeological evidence. The history of cats curling up at our feet is as mysterious as the creatures themselves until more conclusive proof is found; it is a mystery, science, and myth that has yet to be resolved.
