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Cats May Have Been Domesticated Twice (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: Cats may have been domesticated twice, once in Turkey around 10,000 years ago, and again in Egypt, thousands of years later. That's the conclusion of a new genetic analysis of more than 200 ancient cats, including DNA extracted from Egyptian mummies. The scientists found evidence for an exodus of cats into the wider world from both ancient Turkey and ancient Egypt, but that these two waves of cats sported different genetic signatures. Whether or not the ancient Egyptians independently domesticated cats, their massive breeding programs appear to have further tamed the feline, turning cats from territorial and antisocial creatures into the lovable furballs we know today.
Cats have never been domesticated by humans. They domesticated us, and I for one welcome our feline overlords.
Thus one can seriously argue cats have been domesticating humans. We domesticated other animals and plants by careful selection and breeding programs. But cats have been domesticating us using a virus without either the cats or us being aware of it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
It's not a virus, but a parasite. The fact that it has a "life cycle" comprised of several reproductive stages should be a strong hint. Viruses just get host cells to make more viruses.
Cats can be highly social, loving animals if you don't raise them like a feral that happens to live in your house. When ours were kittens, we used to cart them around the house all of the time like babies, holding them, petting them, etc. And quelle surprise... they had a lot more in common with the average dog in terms of affection than the average cat many people know.
Plus discipline. Set boundaries and set them hard from a young age. Cats generally will accept them.
Or not at all, depending on how you define "domesticated." ;)
Well, you've actually very wrong there as castration/sterilisation have little to nothing to do with how friendly a cat is. That's actually almost entirely due to domestication and selective breeding. A small hint might be the fact that to be able to get more cats you need to breed them and this might surprise you but that isn't possible if you've castrated or sterilised the cat.
...these two waves of cats sported different genetic signatures.
Don't forget that cats exist as both waves and particles!
e retards.
Do Tigers count? They're easier to deal with.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Turkey around 10,000 years ago:
Well Tiddles, I don't know about you but a lot of us have had enough of this abuse, kicking us when any little thing goes wrong, tormenting us for their sport, even murdering our poor children, so we're heading out to the desert until they've evolved a bit.
Egypt, thousands of years later:
As you all know, some members of the exploration committee went in to town - and let me tell you we were all a bit scared after those tales we heard as kittens - spent a few weeks cautiously interacting with the humans and trying to teach them our language, generally being friendly and helping to put food on the table and you know what? They treated us like gods.
What is the summary talking about? Cats stopped being antisocial? I beg to differ, especially when cats are compared against dogs. While dogs largely have been tamed, largely becoming scavengers instead of predators, cats seem to retailers many more undomesticated attributes. The development of dogs from wolves was largely accidental, too, with the social skills of approaching human colonies for their scraps providing a significant survival advantage over wolves, which were far less social.
Anyone that has lived with a cat can tell you that they are very social animals. They're just not DEPENDANT on people like dogs are. Dogs are stuck on the "look at me, pay attention to me" mode. Cats are more like people, they have times they want to be with others, and times they want to be alone. They are very social though. They get lonely when left alone, and enjoy the company of others, even if they don't want constant petting.
Cats will typically want to curl up and sleep in whatever room you're in. They may not want you to touch them all the time, but they want to be near you.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Like this guy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
Dogs have evolved to direct their hunting instinct into toys while cats are one of the few animals that kill for entertainment.
Drop a cat into a dog park and check whether you want to re-evaluate that statement...
Cats are just so stubborn that they HAD to be domesticated twice.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I think this pretty much sums up cats.
Have gnu, will travel.
Cats have never been domesticated by humans. They domesticated us, and I for one welcome our feline overlords.
The Internet is the feline third wave, we are doomed.
Anyone that has lived with a cat can tell you that they are very social animals. They're just not DEPENDANT on people like dogs are. Dogs are stuck on the "look at me, pay attention to me" mode. Cats are more like people, they have times they want to be with others, and times they want to be alone. They are very social though.
Or, as an analogy, dogs are like five year olds, constantly wanting and needing attention; cats are like teenagers, mostly independent but occasionally affectionate.
I'm a dog owner and cat owners hate when I'm right.
Cat owners and their ego...they never learn.
These are the funniest two sentences I've read in a row in a long time.
What about these?
https://i.imgur.com/3E0bmQm.gi...
https://i.imgur.com/9N928qW.gi...
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I've got one that's half bobcat half siamese (neither of which is particularly known for being very friendly) and he's the most lovable cuddly fluffball ever. My calico is a hellcat, though.
In my childhood I had a housecat who befriended a group of bobcats (that was puzzling enough as it is) who eventually started hanging around the house. They seemed friendly enough, as well; they did circle around me one night, but when Ben (my cat at the time) came up and rubbed on my leg, they stood down, most of them sitting, some of them laying. From that point, they were either neutral or friendly toward me; I couldn't tell them apart but I would guess the ones who sat were the ones who became neutral and the ones who laid were the ones who became friendly.
TL;DR: My cat became friends with a group of bobcats and saved my life (and made me some new bobcat friends) when I was a kid.
If I can do it by luck, you can do it by skill.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Last time my 6lb calico got into a scrape with a rather large (I'd estimate over 100lb) aussie sheppard, 'twas the dog who needed stitches. She tore up the dog's chin and chest while being held between the dog's jaws and escaped without injury.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Turkey didn't exist 10.000 years ago. Call it Anatolia or the Black Sea Area. There's no reason to dumb down this stuff on Slashdot, is there?
Harvard Office number?
So you think the dog was incapable of biting down? The dog was playing the cat was fighting for it's life.
My dogs' cat, Chewtoy, plays back. Cause he knows he's safe.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
A dog does not play with a cat by picking the cat up in its mouth. I've seen cats and dogs play and they do "play bite" each other, but this was not that. This was a dog trained to eradicate small pet-sized animals, as explained by my friend (and at the time roommate) who owned the dog. I offered to keep the cat confined when the dog was out, but his solution was for the dog to live with his mother because he was certain it would happen again due to the dog's training; and because it was better for the dog to have more land to run around on and hunt as it was trained to do.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
pest-sized...
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Makes sense since other animals and animals were domesticated in multiple places and times too. Good ideas keep happening.
By comparison with their ancestors (wolves), dogs are stuck in a state of perennial puppyhood. Dogs became domesticated by never growing up - they're always stuck in a childish state.
Neotony is a big part of it, as has been shown by Dmitri Belyaev in the Russian Red Fox experiment, but that is not the whole story. Belyaev's work showed significant domestication (and emergence of neotenous traits) in only a few dozen generations. But dogs have undergone selection for about 10,000 generations, and also have developed some other remarkable traits beyond just accepting humans.
For example dogs have a remarkable ability to learn and respond to words and can learn to recognize several hundred words, similar to the ability of a two and a half year old (roughly). They process word recognition in the same region of the brain that humans use for speech. Dogs also exhibit a "theory of mind", being able to guess what human intentions are. If you point at something, a dog will look at what you are pointing at, showing that they understand your intention in making the gesture. No other animal, not even apes, show this ability.
It has been difficult to do comparative intelligence studies in cats because cats aren't interested in cooperating.
[BTW claiming that dogs are as smart as a 5 year old, as some posters here do, is ridiculous. They aren't that smart.]
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
I have a dog and a cat. Does that make me bi?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
No, but if a sexual description is what you want a masochist would probably fit nicely :-)
If it had the cat in it's mouth and wanted to kill it the cat would be _dead_. Dogs that are attacking small things grab and shake, over fast.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
And how did it pick up the soft and squishy cat, wiggling and struggling to not be picked up, in its mouth without squeezing? Her retaliation occurred within one or two shakes, my friend. Kitty was quick about it; we're honestly not sure how the gouges on the dog's chest happened; all we know is they were not there before I let the cat out of my room (I had just gotten home and the cat had not yet been fully introduced to the dog -- thus this incident when they met) and she ran immediately on sight of the dog so we know they didn't happen before the attack. Once she freed herself from the dog's mouth, she bolted, she didn't stick around to further attack after freeing herself. The chest scratches had to have happened in the 1/4 second in which she was in the dog's mouth, but it happened so quickly none of us saw it.
I've seen dogs hunt; my friend, the hunting dog's dog owner (whose mother also happens to have trained dogs professionally when he was growing up -- something she also trained him to do so he could assist), certainly has seen dogs hunt, another of our friends who was present when it happened has likely also seen dogs hunt. Neither friend was too fond of the cat when the attack happened, but the three of us unanimously took on the view that the dog was the aggressor and was certainly on the hunt.
Also, this is a dog that sniffs and licks her playthings before chasing them. She did not sniff or lick my cat; she did not have the opportunity to do so, as my cat bolted upon seeing her. That's when the chase was on.
And I've seen this dog play. With a tiny pomeranian, about the size of my cat and just as fast, as a matter of fact, who also runs on sight of this big dog. When the pom is cornered, as my cat was, Kima, the aussie sheppard in question, does not pick her up; she sniffs and licks, maybe nudges a little with the tip of her nose, then turns around and walks away.
It's almost like dogs have personalities and you have to actually meet one to be able to tell when it's playing or hunting. Yes, understanding general dog psychology can help you guess, but there are subtle behavioral nuances, which I didn't take the paragraphs to detail in my initially summary of the incident, which make all the difference in determining the dog's intent.
TL;DR: You weren't there and you don't know this dog, its temperament, how it was raised or trained, how it plays, how it hunts, how the situation unfolded, or, really, anything about the incident other than the handful of details I've written here (what I can recall definitively about an incident nearly a decade ago) and, possibly, some generalizations about dog psychology which are really only useful as a starting point for learning the personality traits of an individual dog. Those generalizations are not blanket truths that apply unilaterally.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Again: It's very simple. If the dog was in kill mode, the cat would be _dead_. Even a 'friendly' Australian shepherd only takes ONE shake to break a cat's spine. If it's fangs didn't penetrate the cat, it didn't even bite down.
Give the dog a little credit. It tried to play with the cat and got lit up.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Well, if what you say is right, it would be the first time it she had picked up one of her living "playthings". Please understand why I have my doubts.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"turning cats from territorial and antisocial creatures into the lovable furballs we know today."
Really? Have you ever shared a home with a cat? They're pretty much the definition of territorial, and I'd substitute "sociopathic" for "antisocial". It's like TFA was written by a cat. No really, we're lovable furballs. Really. Lovable. Furballs. Now feed me immediately, or I'll wiz in your shoes. I might anyway.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Doesn't mean some dogs aren't rather rough with their toys...
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Only because of the anthropic principle. Or in this case the reverse of it. You are here to report that you have never seen it because, having seen it, you would no longer be here to report back.
Have gnu, will travel.