THE NEW CAT ROOM! (or the Cat Room #2)

How long has he been outside? Are you worried that he's not eating his dried food?

Right now, my two boys George and Joe are alone in my apartment, and will be until the 25th, when I come back. Five days is my absolute limit I will leave them. I fret about leaving enough fresh litter and food and water, etc. Next month, I have to leave them for 6 days, but I will have someone look in on them, freshen water, scoop litter, etc halfway through.

I was a dog person most of my life, so I think I might still be wired for that kind of dependency - but they do always seem to do just fine without me there.

By Robert Mitchum
Tribune staff reporter
Published June 29, 2007

Inside the cells of every pet cat lies a history book, a story detailing the journey from the wilds of Asia to the comforts of a windowsill perch.

Combining the fields of genetics and archeology, scientists have cracked open the book to find that cat domestication occurred near the beginning of human civilization, long before many previous archeological estimates. The circumstances of this early association between man and cat may explain the friendly but tenuous truce between felines and humans.

Published Friday in the journal Science, the research used DNA from modern house cats to trace the origin of domestic cats back to a specific time and region that coincided with the settlement of humans in the Middle East region known as the Fertile Crescent.

Geneticists studied cats as a domestic pet unique in its persistent similarity to its wild ancestors. Modern cats were traced to a common ancestor: a particular species of wildcat that still lives in the same region.

"Our study was able to localize it down to one subspecies whose range included the Near East," said Oxford University zoologist Carlos Driscoll. "Within the Near East was the Fertile Crescent, which is the most likely spot for domestication to have occurred."

Scientists have long debated whether cats were independently domesticated at several regions and points in time, or whether they were first kept as pets in one civilization before being spread around the world. The identification of a single ancestral species for modern house cats supports the single-origin theory.

Driscoll and his colleagues, in a new process known as genomic archeology, compared genetic information from domesticated cats around the world to DNA from various wildcat species. To their surprise, all domestic cats studied shared certain gene sequences with the Near Eastern variety of wildcat.

Though genetic comparisons can reveal where the process likely occurred, it's less reliable as a marker of when humans began keeping cats as companions.

"The molecular clock we're using is not ticking fast enough to make estimates in that recent evolutionary time," Driscoll said. "It'd be like trying to measure a drop of water falling from a spigot with the minute hand of your watch."

In 2004, French researchers found the remains of a cat buried with a human who died roughly 9,500 years ago on the island of Cyprus, where there are no native wildcat species.

This discovery placed the association between humans and cats much further back in history than previously thought. Earlier theories speculated that Egyptians were responsible for cat domestication 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, based on the animal's appearance in art and tombs from the era.

Dating the origin of domestic cats earlier, and placing this process in the Middle East, suggests that cats played an important role in the lives of the first farmers.

"Mankind settled down into agricultural villages for the first time about 12,000 years ago, developing many domestic cereals and plants," said Stephen O'Brien, another of the study's authors. "That's about the time and exact same place that cats walked out of woods and did something unusual: act friendly."

The transition of humans from nomadic hunter-gatherers to stationary farmers drew the attention of rodents who fed on the villages' food stores. These pests, in turn, drew wildcats toward this early human society.

"Cats provided two things to early farmers: companionship and the ability to dispatch rodents that were attacking grain stores, which was critical for early farmers to get through winters," O'Brien said.

This cooperative relationship may explain why domestic cats, unlike dogs and their ancestral relatives, wolves, have not evolved very far from wildcat species.

Modern domestic cats are similar physically to wildcats, save for a wider variety of fur colors that have come from recent breeding practices. Genetically, they are "almost indistinguishable," O'Brien said, "like the difference between Italians and Germans."

In terms of behavior, cats are also different from most species kept by humans for pets or agriculture.

"Domestication isn't a one-size-fits-all process," said zooarcheologist Melinda Zeder of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. "Cats are different in that they really retain their wariness, their aloofness, their prowess as hunters."

In fact, cats may not have even been passive participants in the process of domestication. O'Brien describes the integration of cats into human culture as "one of the most successful biological experiments ever undertaken" by an animal, pointing out that while the domestic cat is thriving, with a population as high as 60 million in America alone, many wildcat species are endangered.

"I think the attitude that [domestication is] human mastery over nature, and that they were bending animals and plants to their will, is really outmoded," Zeder said.

"Really, domestication needs to be looked at as a mutualistic relationship. The cats may have had the upper hand in this relationship in the beginning and retained it to this day."

Vivien

.... then you married a devotee, to boot! I think this is just lovely! Purrrrfect!