Cats can transfer a variety of infections, including MRSA, toxoplasmosis, ringworm, and hookworm.
The ancestors of modern cats followed the first farmers to Europe, but they were not pets, according to a recent study. The ratios of nitrogen isotopes in the bones of six cats from Neolithic Poland suggest that these ancient cats hunted rodents that ate crops from human farmers, but did not eat exactly the same diet as local people and their faithful domestic dogs. In other words, cats lived a lifestyle similar to that of modern coyotes.
Cats lived near people but not with they
All modern cats trace their lineage back to the wild cats of the Near East; in fact, it is still a bit difficult to distinguish domestic cats from these wildcats based on their DNA. About 5,300 years ago, these feral cats seem to have noticed rodents like mice, voles, and grouse congregate in human settlements to eat crops and food stores. Rodents came for grain, and cats came for easy and abundant prey.
Between 4,200 and 2,300 years ago, a population of primitive farmers from Central Asia moved to Europe, where they interacted with hunter-gatherers who already lived there. Some wild cats accompanied him; Archaeologists found skeletons of wild cats from the Near East in Poland from around the same period. Archaeologist Magdalena Krajcarz of Nicolaus Copernicus University and her colleagues say cats really didn’t travel. with the humans were just following their prey. (This argument sounds a bit like a cat wrote it.)
Krajcarz and his colleagues examined the chemical composition of the bones of six Near Eastern wildcats found in southern Poland. As nutrients pass through the food chain, nitrogen-15 tends to pass more than the other stable nitrogen isotope (nitrogen-14), so the relationship between them may suggest what an animal was eating. Household crops also tend to be richer in nitrogen 15, as it is added in the form of manure used as a fertilizer, so a high proportion of nitrogen 15 may also suggest a diet rich in household crops, or in meat from animals that They ate those crops.
Cats from the Near East had fairly high levels of nitrogen-15. But more importantly, the cats’ levels aligned very closely with the nitrogen-15 levels in the bones of local rodents that eat crops. It was the molecular version of a smoking gun, suggesting that about 75 percent to 95 percent of the cats’ menu consisted of rodents that fed on the crops of farmers and grocery stores.
In the farm
But when Krajcarz and colleagues compared cats to ancient people and domestic dogs from nearby settlements, such as Bronocice, they found that people and their dogs had even higher nitrogen-15 levels than cats. That suggests that people were eating a diet based almost entirely on agricultural crops and sharing their food with their canine companions.
Cats, on the other hand, appear to have lived near settlements and have taken advantage of some of the things that come with having humans as neighbors, such as access to many well-fed mice. Their slightly lower, but still high, nitrogen values suggest that they mainly lived on crop pests, but also hunted other types of prey.
Ecologists call this lifestyle synanthropy, and today it can be seen in modern urban foxes, coyotes, raccoons, and crows. For cats, synanthropy was a step toward domestication, on their terms, of course. The earliest cat remains found in human settlements date back to the Roman period in Poland, 3,000 years later, and their nitrogen-15 levels are much closer to humans and dogs.
When the first wildcats from the Near East followed farmers to Europe, they found themselves dividing an ecological niche with the European wildcats that already lived there. The bones of European wildcats that Krajcarz and his colleagues observed had nitrogen-15 levels similar to those of the Near East, but spread over a wider range. That suggests that while Near Eastern cats mainly hunted crop pests, European cats simply added crop-eating rodents to their local menus. Perhaps that partly explains why cats from the Near East, but not Europeans, ended up being domesticated.
Legs to reflect
The six Near Eastern cats that Krajcarz and his colleagues observed came from caves in the hills that dominated the fertile lowlands where people grew. It seems they ended up in the caves, either because they lived and died there or because the larger predators brought them home as a snack. People lived in the highlands, in smaller and more dispersed groups than the agricultural settlements in the valley below. But there is no evidence that the cats were buried.
Those caves were 30 km to 45 km (19 to 28 miles) away from the large nearby agricultural settlements in the valley. That suggests something about the range of these six cats, but there are many things it doesn’t tell us. Archaeologists have found no cat bones in any of the Neolithic settlements in Poland, so there is as yet no evidence to tell us whether cats lived and hunted in even closer proximity to people or whether some actually lived in human homes. or food storage structures.
PNAS, DOI 2020: 10.1073 / pnas.1918884117 (About DOI).
