There is an interesting article in The Times today, Friday, September 1, 2023 which I would like to discuss briefly. The title is “Early humans were on brink of extinction”. Remarkably the research that Kaya Burgess reports on found that the population of Homo sapiens’ ancestors dwindled to less than 1300 adults about 900,000 years …
The reason why humans and their pets might never have existed Read More »
My understanding of this study (see base of page) is that there are four reasons why Australian cat owners keep their cats inside their home. And there are five different ways of owning a cat in terms of containing them inside the home or allowing them outside. Australians have the highest domestic cat containment rates …
4 Australian cat owner attitudes to domestic cat containment or freedom to roam Read More »
There’s been quite a lot of discussion about the first domestic cats in America. We are sure that early Americans, around 10,000 years ago, did not domesticate a wild cat species and thereby create the first domestic cat. That happened in and around what is now Syria with the North African wildcat. So, the only …
Did the Vikings bring the first domestic cats to North America? Read More »
In the image below I have tried to present a feel for what the Fertile Crescent was like around 10,000 years ago when ‘at least five different females from the wildcat population’ befriended farmers and founded one of the greatest populations of domestic animal companions the world has seen: the domestic cat. Of course, around …
All of today’s 600m domestic cats descend from 5 female matriarchal wildcats Read More »
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 is very, very similar to their wildcat ancestor. This makes it difficult to identify the …
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 is an invasive species and where are these countries? Well, an invasive species is a …
10 countries (only) where the domestic cat is a native species Read More »
Domestic cats are not an invasive species in every country. Domestic cats are native to certain countries and in those countries they are not an invasive species. A species of animal is only “invasive” if they are not native or indigenous to a certain place. For cats this means that they were brought to that …
At what date can we say that the domestic cat existed in North America? I think it’s an important subject because the United States is the greatest country in the world for the domestic cat in 2020. Historically, we are told, that there were no domestic cats in North America before European settlers emigrated to …
This story confirms, in my view, that semi-domesticated wildcats travelled with migrants from the Eastern Mediterranean to other parts of the world including Poland where scientists have unearthed the 7,000-year-old remains of wildcats at a farming settlement. Scientists found the humerus bone of a wildcat next to human items, ceramic vessels, in the sediment. The …
Evidence that wildcats lived with humans in Poland 7,000 years ago Read More »
It seems incongruous that for thousands of years humans have shared their homes with fearsome predators. I am referring to the domestic cat. The reason why we do is because of the initial reason why the wild cat was domesticated. They were a utilitarian animal. They were useful as working animals in keeping down rodent …
Humans should have domesticated an intelligent herbivore? Read More »
A recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports has come to the conclusion that the domestication of the cat may have occurred thousands of years earlier than we once imagined. They decided that because the house mouse existed in the Eastern Mediterranean 14,500 years ago it is likely the first domestic cats did too. …
Cats may have been first domesticated 14,500 years ago Read More »
For a long time, people believed that the first cat was domesticated in ancient Egypt about 3,500 years ago. There are lots of records of domestic cats of that time as we well know. This information is still disseminated on the Internet by well-established websites. However, the theory was challenged about 10 years ago when, …
The answer to this question is actually straightforward. Because of circumstance and because the Near Eastern wildcat can be domesticated, it was domesticated about 10,000 years ago. The Near Eastern wildcat (aka North African wildcat) is quite a small animal. In fact, as expected, it is of a similar size to the domestic cat. It …
How can cats be so loving yet vicious? We are obviously referring to domestic cats. You can answer the question in a sentence. Domestic cats can be both loving (a lot) and vicious (rarely) because they are barely domesticated North African wildcats, a top predator and killer, living in an interspecies friendship with humans in …
Why was the cat domesticated? The advent of farming was the reason why the wild cat came to be domesticated. As Dr Morris says ‘there would have been no taming of the cat before the Agricultural Revolution’. This happened during the New Stone Age or Neolithic period – 10,200 BC to no later than 2,000 …
