SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
If you have ever lived with a cat, you might be familiar with the phrase or the feeling that nobody really owns a cat, they own you. Perhaps that is because scientists consider household cats to only be semidomesticated animals, which, as anybody who's lived with a dog knows, is unlike dogs. NPR's Nate Rott reports on a new study aimed at finding when this, let's call it delicate, relationship began.
NATE ROTT, BYLINE: Claudio Ottoni and Marco de Martino are researchers at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Both focus on paleobiology - the study of ancient life. In this case, ancient cats. So...
I'm assuming you guys are both cat people?
MARCO DE MARTINO: Yes.
CLAUDIO OTTONI: I don't know if I'm a cat person, but...
DE MARTINO: Yeah.
ROTT: Me neither (laughter).
OTTONI: I like them.
ROTT: There was a little hesitation..
OTTONI: Yeah, yeah.
ROTT: ...There.
OTTONI: There is. There is.
ROTT: There was a little hesitation.
OTTONI: No, I mean, I'm really fascinated by the animal.
ROTT: This is Ottoni.
OTTONI: I have studied cats now - their genetics - for, like, 15 years.
ROTT: So he gets asked that question a lot. And his typical answer is...
OTTONI: Actually, not really. I like studying animal domestication and cats are fascinating. Maybe I will get a cat for my daughter soon. I don't know. Still - I'm still hesitating (laughter).
ROTT: Cats are fascinating, Ottoni says, because the history of their domestication - when it happened and where - is less understood than the domestication of other animals like pigs, sheep, horses or dogs. In part because domestic cat and wildcat skeletons look almost identical and because archaeological evidence shows humans and cats were interacting long before domestication happened, which de Martino says makes sense when you think about how those first intensive interactions would have occurred.
DE MARTINO: Cats were attracted to food storage containing grains and other goods. This in turn attracted mice, which were a natural prey.
ROTT: So humans attracted mice, mice attracted cats, and somehow, somewhere, the relationship evolved. The new study published in the journal Science, which looked at ancient DNA, suggests the shift happened in north Africa a few thousand years ago. Ottoni says, maybe in Egypt.
OTTONI: Egypt would be, like, the key place because of all the iconography we have.
ROTT: Iconography like the cat-headed goddess Bastet. What was more surprising, though, de Martino says, is their research found...
DE MARTINO: The earliest domestic genomes arrived in Europe roughly around 2,000 years ago - several millennia later than previously thought.
ROTT: In other words, in just 2,000 years, domestic cats went from being geographically isolated to pets all around the world. Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, says the new study helps us understand more about evolution in animal domestication, which could have applications today. For example, he says...
JONATHAN LOSOS: Raccoons, opossums, foxes - they're all in some sense doing the same thing that cats and dogs did - that is adapting to be around us - but they're clearly not what we'd call domesticated.
ROTT: What would it take for that to change? Would we want it to change? Losos doesn't have answers for either, but he says this research helps us better understand our ongoing relationship with nature. And, he adds...
LOSOS: People love cats.
ROTT: Even if cats don't always love us.
Nate Rott, NPR News.
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