An Archaeological and Historical Review of the Relationships between Felids and People

Abstract

A review of the archaeological and historical records reveals several lines of evidence that people have had close relationships with felids. Almost 40% of felid species have been tamed on all continents, excluding Europe and Oceania, but only one species was domesticated. However, taming occurred mostly in five felid lineages, mostly in South and Central America, and Southwest Asia and North Africa, which is consistent with the early development of permanent human settlements and agriculture in these regions. In the Old World, probably since the beginning of the Neolithic, the first farmers encouraged commensal small carnivorans, which had been attracted either by rodent pests or scavenging opportunities. Recent genetic evidence supports archaeological evidence for the domestic cat's origin in the Fertile Crescent of Mesopotamia. However, full domestication may have occurred only in ancient Egypt, where breeding of imported Mesopotamian wildcats may have been controlled, thereby allowing artificial selection, and suggesting that putative early domestic cats were most probably tamed wildcats. As there was no tameable, small felid in Europe, other indigenous carnivorans, such as mustelids, viverrids, and herpestids, were tamed instead. They were slowly replaced as the domestic cat spread gradually throughout Europe, principally with the Romans. The wildcat was fully domesticated, owing probably to a specific set of human cultural events and requirements, rather than as a consequence of a unique tendency to tameness in some populations of Felis silvestris. The global spread of the domestic cat probably obviated the need for domestication of other small felids elsewhere.

Large-scale genetic census of an elusive carnivore, the European wildcat (Felis s. silvestris)

“…Based on molecular data, domestic cats derived from Near Eastern wildcats (Felis s. lybica) and were introduced to Europe around 2000 years ago (Driscoll et al 2007;Faure and Kitchener 2009). In the past years, different rates of introgression from domestic cat alleles in the European wildcat genepool were reported, ranging from low (Mattucci et al 2013;Oliveira et al 2007) to extremely high rates of domestic cat introgression resulting in the local presence of hybrid swarms and the genetic extinction of regional populations (Beaumont et al 2001;Pierpaoli et al 2003).…”

Development and application of CatFACS: Are human cat adopters influenced by cat facial expressions?

“…Caeiro) Cats have associated with humans for around 10,000 years (Hu et al, 2014). During this time, they have been subject to some degree of evolutionary selection processes, both natural and artificial (Yamaguchi et al, 2004;Driscoll et al, 2009a,b;Faure and Kitchener, 2009;Montague et al, 2014), that have resulted in the domestic species known to us today. Domestication is known to influence the morphology, behaviour and cognitive abilities of a species (Price, 1984;Driscoll et al, 2009a;Montague et al, 2014), but in the case of the domestic cat, researchers are only just starting to understand these modifications.…”

Sociality in cats: A comparative review

“…Accounts of its domestication have focused almost exclusively on its evolution of a relationship with mankind (Driscoll et al, 2009a;Faure and Kitchener, 2009;Serpell, 2014) and not with its equally remarkable and rapid evolution of an intraspecific social system. Our other domesticated carnivoran, the domestic dog Canis lupus familiaris, also displays both inter-and intra-specific sociality, but both of these may be plausibly traced to the sophisticated sociality of its ancestral species the wolf Canis lupus (Marshall-Pescini and Kaminski, 2014): by contrast, the biological origins of the domestic cat's sociability remain obscure.…”