The Near Eastern wildcat: The ancestor of today’s housecat (Credit: Arno Meintjes/Flickr)

Take a look at the cat snuggled in your bed or the dog lounging on your sofa, and it’s hard to believe that just a few thousand years ago these were wild animals. Dogs were gray wolves that roamed Europe and Asia, sniffing out prey and tearing carcasses apart. Cats were wildcats, slinking through the deserts of the Middle East and eking out an existence on rodents, birds, and reptiles. Somehow, someway, the genes of both animals changed enough to turn them into the lovable pets we know today. Now scientists are finally getting a glimpse of what some of those changes may have been.

In a study published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers reports finding a handful of genetic modifications that may have turned the wildcat into the housecat. Many of these changes are in genes you would expect: those tied to things like fear, memory, and the ability to learn new behaviors when given a food reward. After all, in order for wildcats to become kitty cats, they had to become less afraid of people and learn to live with them. This likely happened around 10,000 years ago, scientists believe, as the first wildcats entered early farming villages to hunt rodents that that were feasting on our grain. These felines wouldn’t have lasted long if they couldn’t adapt to life with humans.
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(Credit: Ohnoitsjamie / Wikimedia Commons)

When you spend four years researching a book on dogs and cats, you learn some surprising things. Here is a list of my favorites, culled from my new book, Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs, which traces the journey of pets from wild animals to family members.

More homes have dogs and cats than have kids. Nearly 150 million cats and dogs live in the U.S., one for every two people. More than half of all homes contain either a dog or a cat — five times more than have birds, horses, and fish combined. Dog and cat ownership has quadrupled since the mid-1960s — double the growth rate of the human population.

Cats aren’t from Egypt. Historians long thought that cats became domesticated in Ancient Egypt around 4,000 years ago, based on the appearance of felines in the art of the time. But recent archaeological and genetic evidence suggest that cats arose instead in what is today Israel, Turkey, and Iraq, and that they first became domesticated nearly 10,000 years ago — 5,000 years before Egypt even existed.

Dogs can outsmart chimpanzees. Point at something, and a dog will look at what you’re pointing at. Though this may seem a simple skill, our closest relatives, chimpanzees, can’t do it. That means dogs (and it turns out, cats too) may possess a rudimentary “theory of mind” — an ability to intuit what others are thinking that is rare in the animal kingdom.

A cat massacre in Europe may have sparked the Black Death. In the early thirteenth century, Pope Gregory IX issued an edict that linked cats to witchcraft and Satan. Centuries of cat massacre followed, with felines being stoned, hung, and thrown in bonfires in Medieval Europe. Some historians believe that the near-extinction of the cat allowed plague-carrying rats to flourish, helping them spread the Black Death that wiped out as much as half of the continent’s human population.

The Ancient Romans buried their dogs in human cemeteries. As much as the Ancient Egyptians worshiped their cats, the Ancient Romans revered their dogs. They buried their pooches in the same places they buried their human dead. And they wrote surprisingly sentimental eulogies for them. “I am in tears while carrying you to your last resting place,” reads one, “as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home in my own hands fifteen years ago.”

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