It’s a point worth making. You hear a lot about the first domestic cats coming into being about 10,000 years ago. These are the first N. African wildcats who befriended humans and vice versa; both benefiting in an act of … 
No, I’m not referring to domestic cats would like to open refrigerator doors and creep inside to either ‘steal’ the food for have a snooze, I’m referring to a special race of domestic cat living in sub-zero temperatures in industrial-sized …
The question is asking for information about the world’s very first domestic cat. We don’t have that information. We have a rough idea when the North African wildcat was first domesticated but that is about it. The domestic cat’s skeleton …
Eighty-five million years ago, Australia, New Guinea, and New Zealand separated from the major land mass called Gondwanaland. About 200 million years ago Australia was attached to Antarctica. 85 million years ago was well before the beginnings of the evolution …
Researchers have decided that cats evolved from a fierce saber-toothed predator that occupied North America 42 million years ago. They also decided that this “new species” was among one of the first mammals to be an obligate carnivore. At this …
On my reckoning, there are only 10 countries where the domestic cat is a native species or a non-invasive species. In all the other countries of the world the domestic cat could be described as an invasive species. So, what …
Introduction – the relationship between Ancient Egyptians and domestic and wildcats was not as rosy as you think Cats in ancient Egypt were used for the benefit of people despite being worshipped, and despite the idea that they were treated …
The illustration comes from The History of Reynard the Fox. In this 15th century woodcut, we see Tybert the Cat castrating a village priest. Incidentally, “Tybert” is spelled in two other ways, namely ‘Tibert’ and ‘Tybalt’. Unusually, there is absolutely …
In a famous Indian fable in the Panchatantra, an ancient collection of animal fables in Sanskrit verse and prose from 200 BCE-300CE, the domestic cat is portrayed as sly, underhand and hypocritical. The fable which I describe below is immortalised …
When people move home, they take their cat companion. This has been going on for thousands of years. It is how the domestic cat has spread throughout the world. For example, the Romans did quite a bit of empire building …
This post is specifically about the evolution of the domestic cat since domestication. I do not address the evolution of the wildcat pre-domestication. It’s fairly well-known and currently accepted that the first domestic cats on the planet existed around 10,000 …
It is sad and telling of modern life that the famous place where the first wildcats were domesticated by farmers, the Fertile Crescent, which encompasses Syria and the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, is now a place where there are no …
NEWS AND COMMENT: I have been slightly adventurous in the title to this article. But I think I am within acceptable tolerances! Archaeologists have been excavating at an English Heritage site in Richborough, Kent, UK. It’s the site of an …
Fiona Sunquist in her book Wild Cats of the World tells me that the first animal to be domesticated was the grey wolf now the domestic dog and that Felis sylvestris a.k.a. the wildcat was “almost the last species to …
Yes, there is a common ancestor to the cat and dog. If you believe in evolution as set out by Charles Darwin in his work “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection…” you will believe that there …
