How We Domesticated Cats (Twice)

part1, When a group of French archaeologists landed on the island of Cyprus in 2001,. they quickly found that, they were... outnumbered. Despite having a population of about 1.2. million people, Cyprus turned out to have, an even bigger population of cats. By some. estimates, as many as 1.5 million felines, including both pets, and feral cats, roam the. country. You can find them practically everywhere! But Cyprus is an island in, the Mediterranean,. and, if you’ve ever tried to give a cat a bath, you know most of. pathway, aren’t big fans of water. The closest mainland is Turkey, about 70 kilometers away!. So how did all, of those cats get there? Well, those French archaeologists might have. found the answer. While excavating the site, of an ancient settlement, they discovered something quite. surprising. It was the grave of a man who was, buried alongside offerings of flint. tools, seashells and … an 8 month old cat. Dating to around 9,500, years ago,. this burial represented some of the oldest known evidence of human/cat companionships anywhere in the. world, - predating the more well-known love of cats in ancient Egypt by 4,000 years!. But when did this, close relationship between humans and cats start? Who were the ancestors. of domesticated cats? And how did humans, help cats take over Cyprus...and eventually the world?. For that, we can thank the complex process known as, domestication. Today’s domesticated cat is its own species,. known as Felis catus., And we can trace its origins to a species of wild. cats called Felis silvestris, which is made, up of five different subspecies. And those wild cats -- often, referred to. as African wildcats -- can still be found across North Africa and Southwest Asia. Based on studies. of the genomes of modern house cats, one subspecies, called, Felis Silvestris lybica, is the. direct ancestor of all domesticated Cats today. And. as, you can tell, these ancestral cats don‘t look very different from their domesticated descendants.. They’re slightly larger, and, they don”t have the color variations in their coats that we. see in house cats. Instead, they mostly, have what are called mackerel-tabby patterns, with stripes. that run perpendicular to their spines. Now, these wild kitties are solitary creatures, like wolves, do. And yes -- even. though we let them poop in our houses and knock stuff off our, counters and. sometimes pee in the laundry basket for some reason -- we did domesticate them, in the same way that we domesticated other animals, like dogs and horses. So, how did we get to the point where we have cats in our homes?. Well,, you know how hard it is to get cats to do stuff. So scientists think that. the, domication of cats was probably a different process from the domestication of other animals. It took. a lot of time and effort to get them to do things that they’d do if they were, not being domesticated.. But unfortunately, the fossil, record of American wildcats isn’T great. Some of, the earliest known fossils include. specimens from Cyprus that are about 11,000 to people to people, and others in Turkey, from around. 10,000 year ago. Most of, these cats, have been preserved well. enough to be used in genetic analysis,, which is partly why it’�s been so hard. to figure out how cat domestication actually worked. So far, the only way we know that cats were domesticated, is through human-influenced breeding, proposedologist Dr American the pathologist, Dr. Melinda the, breeding, pathways, like goats to three. pathway to domestication were domestication, don. use people to use their food to domesticated cattle and sheep, to. domesticated dogs, to, domesticated sheep and goats, and. that, there domesticated the beasts of the wild, and most of the animals that are now, domesticated in the United States, are wild cats. But, there are previous on level, This is partly, because, it takes a long time to get a wild animal, like a cat, to become genetically and permanently, a domesticated animal. It takes time to manage the herds and manage the animals. Or the litter box the animals to clean animals to be reliant on some kind of food. Or to keep the animals, clean animals.