Leopard cats were on the “doorstep to domestication” in China before housecats moved it. (Credit: Kuribo / Wikimedia Commons.)
We tend to take cats and dogs for granted. Maybe it’s because they’re everywhere. Maybe it’s because we just can’t imagine any other animals as such beloved companions. But could we have ended up with pet foxes or badgers instead?
It’s a mystery I’ve written about before: Given that a host of other wild animals lived in close proximity to humans thousands of years ago, why did only gray wolves and the African wildcat evolve into our most treasured companions? As Melinda Zeder, an archaeozoologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, says, “It’s the million-dollar question.”
Was there something just inherently special about the ancestors of dogs and cats? A new study adds further evidence that this may be the case. Researchers investigating how housecats first made it to China have discovered–via a genetic analysis of nearly two dozen ancient specimens from the country–that felines arrived there about 1400 years ago, carried by traders from the West along the famed Silk Road.
Curiously, these domestic cats replaced another feline species that was on the “doorstep to domestication,” as Zeder calls it. Thousands of years before housecats arrived in China, leopard cats lived in close proximity to humans in early farming villages. Like African wildcats, they appear to have been drawn into these settlements by rodents, which were in turn drawn in by grain. And like African wildcats, this close proximity to people appears to have placed them on the path to self-domestication.
Yet leopard cats mysteriously disappeared from human contexts in China hundreds of years before housecats came in from the West. What happened to them?
Their disappearance coincides with the end of the eastern Han dynasty, a chaotic period when warfare and climate change would have eliminated many of the settlements–and people–the leopard cat had come to rely on. When things eventually restabilized, any leopard cats that approached human towns and villages would have discovered that housecats had taken their place. Another thing working against leopard cats: They are notorious killers of chickens, says says Shu-Jin Luo, a geneticist at Peking University who oversaw the research, even earning the nickname “chicken killer tiger”. As such, they would have been felis non grata in a world increasingly reliant on poultry farming.
And thus, yet another potential pet fell by the wayside as cats and dogs continued their ascent into our hearts, and eventually into our homes. So, back to my original question: Why cats and dogs? Were their ancestors more adaptable to human society? Were they more chill than their rivals? Was it just good luck? The leopard cat example suggests all three may have been at play. One thing we know for sure, says Zeder: “There’s clearly something special about these two species.”