Much like the behavior of cats, the origin of Felis catus is replete with mystery. While domestic cats are one of the most popular pets globally today, the process of how they came to be domesticated is not entirely understood — a situation made more complicated by the fact that cats still are not fully domesticated.
In a new study, scientists examined the relationship between humans and cats during the Neolithic Period to pinpoint when cats became pets. This study indicates that, in Europe, the road to becoming a housecat began when Near Eastern wildcats, the ancestor of domestic cats, followed early farmers to the continent.
The foundation of this study are Near Eastern wildcat bones dated to 4,200 to 2,300 BCE found in Poland — bones that the study team yearned to find, but never expected to actually discover.
Magdalena Krajcarz is the study's first author and a researcher at the Institute of Archeology at Nicolaus Copernicus University. She tells Inverse her interest in ancient cats was triggered by the discovery of a felid mandible from a cave in southern Poland, found within the archeological context of an ancient Celtic ritual.
[---]
"We are not giving up on cats," Krajcarz says. "This is just the beginning of a more in-depth study of cat history."
- More Here
And full paper here:
In a new study, scientists examined the relationship between humans and cats during the Neolithic Period to pinpoint when cats became pets. This study indicates that, in Europe, the road to becoming a housecat began when Near Eastern wildcats, the ancestor of domestic cats, followed early farmers to the continent.
The foundation of this study are Near Eastern wildcat bones dated to 4,200 to 2,300 BCE found in Poland — bones that the study team yearned to find, but never expected to actually discover.
Magdalena Krajcarz is the study's first author and a researcher at the Institute of Archeology at Nicolaus Copernicus University. She tells Inverse her interest in ancient cats was triggered by the discovery of a felid mandible from a cave in southern Poland, found within the archeological context of an ancient Celtic ritual.
[---]
"We are not giving up on cats," Krajcarz says. "This is just the beginning of a more in-depth study of cat history."
- More Here
And full paper here:
Abstract
Cat remains from Poland dated to 4,200 to 2,300 y BCE are currently the earliest evidence for the migration of the Near Eastern cat (NE cat), the ancestor of domestic cats, into Central Europe. This early immigration preceded the known establishment of housecat populations in the region by around 3,000 y. One hypothesis assumed that NE cats followed the migration of early farmers as synanthropes. In this study, we analyze the stable isotopes in six samples of Late Neolithic NE cat bones and further 34 of the associated fauna, including the European wildcat. We approximate the diet and trophic ecology of Late Neolithic felids in a broad context of contemporary wild and domestic animals and humans.
In addition, we compared the ecology of Late Neolithic NE cats with the earliest domestic cats known from the territory of Poland, dating to the Roman Period. Our results reveal that human agricultural activity during the Late Neolithic had already impacted the isotopic signature of rodents in the ecosystem. These synanthropic pests constituted a significant proportion of the NE cat’s diet. Our interpretation is that Late Neolithic NE cats were opportunistic synanthropes, most probably free-living individuals (i.e., not directly relying on a human food supply). We explore niche partitioning between studied NE cats and the contemporary native European wildcats. We find only minor differences between the isotopic ecology of both these taxa. We conclude that, after the appearance of the NE cat, both felid taxa shared the ecological niches.
No comments:
Post a Comment