Johannesburg - Somewhere in the Fertile Crescent, nearly 10 000 years ago, near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers a purrrfect friendship was born.
Cats and humans became a thing at a time when our ancestors were in desperate need of a pest controller.
It had only been a short while since humans had given up their wandering hunter gatherer ways and had settled down to a life of farming. With farming came the problem of rats and mice, and cats came along just at the right time.
In return, humans gave them warm beds, laps, hands to scratch after tummy rubs and heaps of adulation that at times their new furry friends seemed to spurn.
A new study at the University of Missouri has found just where humans first domesticated cats. And it all happened during a lifestyle change.
Felines and humans first met during the rise of those first civilisations just at the dawn of the agricultural revolution.
Leslie A Lyons, a feline geneticist discovered this important event by peeling back time through the study of cat DNA.
Her research appeared in the latest issue of the journal Heredity.
She collected DNA from cats in and around the Fertile Crescent that spans modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan, as well as from felines throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, comparing nearly 200 different genetic markers.
“One of the DNA main markers we studied were microsatellites, which mutate very quickly and give us clues about recent cat populations and breed developments over the past few hundred years,” Lyons says in a statement.
“Another key DNA marker we examined were single nucleotide polymorphisms, which are single-based changes all throughout the genome that give us clues about their ancient history several thousands of years ago. By studying and comparing both markers, we can start to piece together the evolutionary story of cats,” she says.
What Lyons also found while picking through the cat’s genetic history is that their first dealings with humans was far different to that of other animals like horses and cattle.
Both these animals went through various domestication events by humans living in different parts of the world. Cats, on the other hand, appeared to have been domesticated first in the Fertile Crescent.
Cape Town-based cat behaviourist Barbara George suspects that feline domestication probably took a while to complete, as cats would have held out.
“In my opinion, they weren't domesticated at that time, they would have rarely come into houses, preying on wild animals outside of houses, maybe in barns. It is only more recently, in say the last five or 6 000 years that you could call them fully domesticated,” she says.
Once they were fully domesticated, cats with their humans spread around the world, following migration routes and trading on their reputations as champion ratters.
Archaeologists have found their remains in burial sites, lying next to the humans that likely loved them dearly and hoped to take them along into the afterlife.
The bones of one cat were found at a Viking site.
There is a modern day spin-off to Lyons’ research. She hopes to use cats as a biomedical model to study genetic diseases that impact cats and humans like polycystic kidney disease, blindness and dwarfism.
“Comparative genetics and precision medicine play key roles in the ‘One Health’ concept, which means anything we can do to study the causes of genetic diseases in cats or how to treat their ailments can be useful for one day treating humans with the same diseases,” she explains.
“I am building genetic tools, genetic resources that ultimately help improve cat health. When building these tools, it is important to get a representative sample and understand the genetic diversity of cats worldwide so that our genetic toolbox can be useful to help cats all over the globe, not just in one specific region,” she says.
And while humans and cats have spent over 10 millennia getting to know each other, our feline friends can still be a mystery to us.
George spends her days trying to work out what cats, through their odd behaviour, are trying to tell their owners. She feels that often it is not the cat that has the problem, but rather its humans.
“When I look at a behaviour problem with a cat, I look at it from the cat's perspective, not from the owner’s. What is the cat trying to say, because all their behaviour is a message. Sometimes it's really difficult, you have to go through a couple of iterations before you get to what is actually the problem,” she says.
We may have tamed cats, but they are not really fully domesticated. Unlike dogs, most cats can wander off into the wild and survive, shrugging off their dependency on humans.
“That is the thing with cats, there is always that underlying wild cat in them,” says George.