Jonathan B. Losos
Appearances
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, everyone knows what a cat is just by looking at one. And it turns out that the first cat that was discovered in the fossil record, the ancestor of all cats, as far as we can tell, evolved about 30 million years ago. And it pretty much looked like a cat.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Its legs were a little bit shorter than most cats, but if you saw one walking down the street, you would say, hey, that's a cat. And so, I mean, I could give you the technical aspects of the anatomy that define members of the Thelidae, the cat family, but essentially a cat is a cat and no one's going to confuse one with something else.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And that's been true throughout the evolutionary history of this group. There have been variations, bigger and smaller, spots on the coat and so on. Of course, there were the saber-toothed cats, but essentially they've all been cats.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Well, today there are 42 living species, and I think people might be surprised to hear that, that there are so many. Everyone knows the big cats. Those are the celebrities of the cat world, the lions, the tigers, the cheetahs, and so on. They have their own week on National Geographic, and everyone knows them.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
The little cats, though, which I'm defining as cats that weigh less than 50 pounds, are much more common. And I like to ask people, can you name species of cats less than 50 pounds? And the two that people usually get right away are the ocelot and the bobcat. But after that, people often are stumped. But there's all kinds of obscure cats that no one has heard of.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
The tigrina, the ancilla, the marbled cat, the Bornean bay cat, the rusty footed cat.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Well, that's a great question, and scientists have been studying that for quite some time now. And the consensus, it's pretty clear at this point that the domestic cat, which is what we call the species around us, technically Felis caddis, the domestic cat evolved from the African wildcat. This is a species that is found throughout Africa and into the Arabian Peninsula and Western Asia.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And they actually look... Very much alike. I like to say that if you saw an African wildcat in your backyard, your response would not be, what's an African wildcat doing in New Jersey? But it would be, what a beautiful cat. I've never seen one quite like that. So they are very similar in their anatomy and it turns out in their DNA as well.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
But it's very clear that that was the ancestor of the domestic cat and that domestication probably occurred somewhere in the area called the Fertile Crescent that stretches from Turkey, Syria, Israel through to Egypt and where civilization really got its start, where people first settled down and lived in villages and agriculture developed.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Well, the probable path, and this is actually very hard to study actually, but what seems very likely is that when people started living in villages and growing crops and agriculture really took off, well, as you know, when farmers grow crops, there's the good season and the bad season.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
So you grow as much food as you can when the seasons are right, and then you store the food for the rest of the year in granaries or whatever. Well, when that happens, the logical, obviously what happens next is that rodents are attracted. Mice and rats see this bounty of food in this building that they can easily go through the walls. And so they start, the rodent population explodes.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Well, in turn, African wildcats are no dummies, and they realize there's all these choice yummy rodents right there, and so they are attracted to live around the villages. But the important thing to keep in mind here is that animals have personalities. This has been a very vibrant area of research in the last few years. And by personalities, I mean behavioral tendencies.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Some cats behave differently than others just due to their predispositions, just like people. And so to anthropomorphize, there might be some cats that are bold and curious and others that are scaredy cats. They're timid and afraid. So the ones that are bolder, using the term loosely, may have been willing to go around villages to be near people to take advantage of the rodents.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And those would be the ones that benefited, that they would get lots of food to eat, and so they would have lots of kittens. And as a result, the genetic mutations that are responsible for those behaviors would become more common in the population. And so it would be a phenomenon that the cats that are willing to hang around people do better.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
and in turn people may have seen the benefit of these cats so maybe they started putting out a little food for them to to encourage them to be around or maybe they gave them shelter a warm a warm spot to sleep when uh at night or day when they were sleeping and so this back and forth where the cats that were willing to do this benefited and then people encouraged it even more and eventually the cats were hanging around the village all the time and maybe people started petting them
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Let me answer that in a couple of ways. First is that the most likely scenario for dog domestication is pretty similar, that the curious or boldest dog started hanging around people, and in this case, probably eating the scraps and the trash and so on. But it probably occurred in a very similar sort of scenario But it happened a lot earlier.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
The archaeological record suggests that dogs may have been domesticated 15,000 years ago or even earlier. The genetic data suggests it might have been closer to 30,000 years. So dogs have been domesticated longer than cats have. And so maybe the difference is just due to time. But there's another possibility, and that is that dogs are pack animals.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And so somewhere during the domestication process, humans were able to substitute ourselves as the alpha dogs, if you will. That's a gross characterization. And so we've been able to take over the lead, and dogs have just adapted their pack living behaviors and directed them towards us. And so they may have been predisposed to become much more intimately involved with people than cats were.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
So that may explain the difference. On the other hand, there is this idea that cats are aloof loners, and that is not entirely true. It turns out that in places where cats occur at high densities, they actually are very social with each other, very amiable to each other.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And in fact, they form groups that are very similar to the prides of lions, that lions are famous for living in groups that are composed of related females. And these females are extremely friendly to each other. They groom each other. They lie on top of each other. They actually help raise each other's young.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And the males, when they grow up, they leave the pride, but the females stay put, so they're all related. And it turns out that in places where there's a lot of food, cats will occur at high densities. And that food might be because people are just putting food out for them, as happens in many places around the US and elsewhere.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Or it may be in places where, like fishing villages, where there are big piles of scraps that the cats eat. But in any case, the plentitude of food allows the cats to occur at a high density. And they live in groups that are very similar to lion prides. They're groups of related females that are very friendly to each other. They groom each other. They help raise their young.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
They even sometimes serve as a midwife and help during the birth of the kittens. And so they are very friendly to each other. Now, there will be multiple groups of cats in one place, and they're not friendly at all to members of other groups, but they are friendly to their own groups. So under some circumstances, cats can actually be very friendly to each other. One last thing.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
There are some breeds of cats that have been developed that are extremely affectionate, almost could be mistaken for dogs in ways. And so cats do have that possibility, but it has to be brought out.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Well, the lion is actually the only wild species of cat that does that, that lives in groups. The cheetah is somewhat of an exception. Brothers will band together to try to control the territory and work together to control the territory and mate with the females within it. But with that exception, there are no other wild species of cat that live in groups.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And so the fact that the domestic cat does this, at least under some circumstances, is really an interesting parallel. It's really true social living in groups and friendliness. It's only the domestic cat and the lion.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Well, I want to answer that at two timescales. Going way back in time, the first archaeological evidence of cats and humans living together is about 10,000 years ago from an archaeological site in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean near Turkey. But we don't know if that was a domesticated cat or just a wild cat that that had become somewhat tame.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
We do know that cats were domesticated by the time of the Egyptian civilizations, that 3,500 years ago, we can see paintings on tomb walls and sculptures that clearly reveal cats living in a domesticated way, wearing collars and going on outings with the family and eating food underneath the table and so on. So historically, cats really became pets Certainly by the time of the Egyptians.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And the question is, did it actually happen in Egypt or did it happen somewhere else? And then the cats came to Egypt. And we don't know the answer to that. More recently, a key development in the interaction of people and cats was the development of kitty litter, which was only invented in the 1940s. And before that time,
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
The possibility of having a cat that just lived indoor all the time was very difficult. And so most cats were indoor outdoor cats. And as a result, we're not as intimate family members oftentimes as cats are today. But since the advent of kitty litter, that's really changed the ability of people to have cats as as pets that stay inside all the time.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Well, they're very smart. Cats are very smart animals, as are dogs. And we could get into this argument back and forth. It's a little bit of apples and oranges because it's hard to directly compare the two animals. And in particular, part of the reason it's hard is
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Because of dogs' nature, it's easy to do experiments where you can test how quickly they learn because they love being rewarded, particularly with attention and affection. And so it's easy to train a cat, sorry, to do an experiment to see how a dog... how quickly it can figure things out.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Cats can be a little more difficult to do these experiments, but people have done them, and it turns out cats are just as smart as dogs, you know, as a chauvinist, I'd say even smarter than dogs, but they're certainly very smart. They do know their names. They can tell when the person they live with is talking to them as opposed to talking to another person. They can be trained, actually.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
There are whole books on this, and it's not actually that hard. It's the same principle that you train a dog. You just reward them for the behaviors that you would like them to perform, and the reward is food. Cats are very food-oriented. So overall, cats, cats are very smart. They can figure things out and they understand their names and other and other.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
You know, you can do many different tests and they show that they're very smart animals.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Yeah. All the time. Cats are even more so because dogs sometimes will settle for affection and sometimes cats will. But if you really want a cat to do something, give the cat a treat.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
I would have to agree with you. That is a great story. I have heard some stories like that. It does happen. Cats and dogs are renowned for returning to their old homes when people move. That's very well established. But I've heard of stories of dogs and cats showing up several years later, just as you described.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
There's an interesting, if I can take a tangent to that story, people, researchers have started
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
studying pet cats to see what they do when they go outside and now in the united states most people don't let their cats out but some people do and it's more common in other countries and so the way they research this is um one of two ways they either put a little tracking device on the cat and you can then these days you can just follow it where the cat is doing on your computer or even your your cell phone and you get very accurate readings of where the cat is
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And as a result, you can see where it's wandering to, how far away from home it goes, and so on. The other thing is researchers have developed little cameras that you put around the cat's neck on its collar, and you can get the cat's eye view of where it's going and what it's doing. And you can actually buy both of these now as commercial products, although researchers use higher quality ones.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And anyway, there are all kinds of fascinating things about the behavior of these cats outside. But the one that I think is kind of funny is there are a number of cases. It's quite common that when Bill Smith tracks his cat, it turns out that it visits the neighbor's houses. And it goes in through the cat flap, or maybe the owner lets them in. And they have multiple homes.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Well, in more wild settings or certainly in feral cats, cats that live outside all the time that are unowned, dogs are a real threat because dogs are predatory animals and they are much bigger. And if a dog and a cat get into a fight, And many times the cat will lose. Sometimes it can fight the dog off, but dogs can be a real threat in nature.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And so it's understandable in a way that there is this instinct of cats to be wary of dogs. And some dogs, some more aggressive dogs can be very, very aggressive towards cats. So there is that. On the other hand, in many households, dogs and cats get along very well. And often a trick to that is when they're introduced when they're young.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
And so it's quite common that people can have dogs and cats and they do quite fine together. One interesting thing is that dogs and cats are able to understand each other's signals that like many animals, dogs and cats communicate with body postures and so on, but they sometimes have signals that differ between species.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
The most obvious one is what they do with their tail, that a dog whose tail is moving back and forth wagging its tail, that's a friendly gesture. A cat that's wiggling its tail back and forth, that's a gesture. I'm nervous. I'm upset. Something not good is happening here. And nonetheless, the dogs and cats are able to figure out what each other mean.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Another example is that a common behavior, a friendly behavior of cats is to touch noses. Anyone who's had multiple cats in their house has seen that. Dogs don't do that, but when dogs and cats live together, sometimes the dog will figure it out and will engage in nose touching with cats as a friendly gesture.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
So the bottom line is there are reasons why sometimes dogs and cats don't get along, but oftentimes they can live together amicably.
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The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
Well, you're very welcome. It's been a pleasure talking with you.
Something You Should Know
The Surprising History of the 7-Day Week & How and Why Cats Evolved into Pets - SYSK Choice
It's a fascinating story. A key development in the interaction of people and cats was the development of kitty litter, which was only invented in the 1940s. Before that time, the possibility of having a cat that just lived indoor all the time was very difficult. All this today on Something You Should Know.