In the Company of Cats

The felines that have captivated and influenced humans for millennia

Stalking prey, rolling in meadows or simply watching the world, tail a-swish: since pre-history, humans have been fascinated by cats of all sizes. These charismatic creatures have purred and roared their way into humanity’s hearts, hearths and arts, while never losing their signature style.

Throughout history, humans around the globe have maintained a relationship with cats, expressing it through art, stories, and decorative objects, often invoking the many ways that felines are unlike us.

Humans are social animals with bodies built for gathering all the elements of a diverse omnivorous diet. All cats, on the other hand, share a number of characteristics distinct from humans: they are obligate carnivores, meaning the vast majority of their diet must be animal tissues; they have loose and flexible limbs, ideal for capturing prey and for scaling trees; all (except the cheetah) have retractable claws; the vast majority are solitary, and, excepting the lion, lack a strong social structure even when they do form groups for purposes like child rearing.

Humanity’s ongoing fascination with these extraordinary creatures is evidenced in art and cultural objects throughout history and prehistory. Some have modeled their weapons after a tiger’s claws, like the bagh nakh of India. Others have sought to invoke for themselves the regal power of a cat, such as the historical leaders of China or Paraguay.

But wild cats, big and small, have come into increasing competition with human settlements over the centuries. Today, habitat loss and fragmentation is a key conservation risk for cats–as is hunting by humans.

Jenn Martin is a keeper at the Toronto Zoo who works with its snow leopards, Jita and Pemba. The snow leopard, like many other wild cats, is in danger of becoming extinct. One of its biggest threats is humans, including those who share its home range in mountainous parts of Asia. “Between human encroachment and the lack of food available in some areas, the cats will enter villages and take livestock to sustain themselves. Farmers will then kill the cats in retaliation,” Martin says.

Poaching is an even bigger threat. “An average of one snow leopard a day is poached and killed for its fur,” she says. Similar obstacles are faced by many other wild cats. A booming black-market trade for the skins, claws, teeth, and innards of jaguars, tigers, and many other species, testifies to the dark side of humanity’s enduring fascination with the feline.

Nowhere is humanity’s complex relationship with the family Felidae more strongly represented than in the history of Felis catus, the house cat. Feline domestication was “a slow process that happened over time, not something that was fast,” says Eva-Maria Geigl, a paleogeneticist and lead researcher at the Institute Jacques-Monod in Paris. “It was probably most of the time not very directed by humans.” 

Geigl and her colleagues study the genetic history of human and domestic animal evolution. In a 2017 study, they examined the mitochondrial DNA of cats from as far back as the Neolithic to find that the domestic cat as we know it today is the result of a long, slow process of humans and felines coming together.

In the Fertile Crescent, during the Neolithic period, local cats from a subspecies of the African wildcat began to stay close to humans who had started cultivating grain. Since the grain attracted rodents, the area had a ready source of food. The cats and the humans had a shared aim in rodent reduction, so nobody did much about their new neighbors–particularly because this wildcat was small and no threat to humans.

Over time, Geigl and her colleagues postulate, the least timid of the cats began to cultivate a closer relationship with local humans. Then the humans, now more settled and agrarian, began to migrate. “They started to move to Africa and Europe,” says Geigl. Their new feline comrades went with them by land and sea: “We see these lineages all over the ancient world.”

Cats continued to associate with people because it suited both parties: humans are ill-suited to catching small rodents who could consume precious grain or gnaw the ropes and leather of ships, while cats benefited from access to human spaces that were relatively warm and dry and had a ready food source.

Unlike dogs, who were domesticated much earlier, cats don’t actually share a lot of traits with humans, says Geigl, but the two species worked well together. “It is a commensal relationship,” she says. (Similar evidence has been found elsewhere, including in China, but in those places, humans and cats never got close enough to become domestic pals.

The researchers only had limited genetic records to work from: samples of bone, skin and hair from Africa, the Middle East and Europe that were painstakingly collected and sequenced by researchers since the early 1980s. But they also had evidence from art and from cultural objects testifying that humans and cats became much closer over time.

As far back as 10,000 years ago, people in the Levant were crafting stone figurines of cats—and there’s some archaeological evidence they were kept as pets, including a 9,500-year-old burial site in Cyprus. Later, says Geigl, the evidence from art increases: “In the Minoan culture (3100–1100 BCE), you also see cat figurines.”

The richest source of early art and cultural objects dealing with the cat’s changing status was Ancient Egypt, where they’re shown carved ivory knives and wall carvings as far back as 2200 BCE. Images of cats hunting alongside humans in marshes are believed to be wild cats, dating as far back as the Middle Kingdom. Slowly, over time, art featuring cats in human settings, especially sitting under the chair of a woman, became commonplace. By around 1450 BCE it appeared as a common place image.

“Wild cats are solitary animals and very fearsome,” Geigl says. “You would not have a cat under a chair unless there is something already changed in the behaviour of cats so that they coexist with humans.”

Ancient Egyptian civilization, throughout its long span, was highly religious and considered animals to have sacred significance. Cats were portrayed as gods, including Sekhmet, a lion-headed goddess, and her son Maahes. Around 1000 BCE, the cult of Bastet began to gain prominence and cats were bred by temples and turned into cat mummies.

“This was so popular that they needed millions of cats,” says Geigl. “There was a whole industry around it.” Her team was able to analyze a few samples from extant Egyptian cat mummies, finding that cats descended from the Egyptian cat spread far and fast around the Mediterranean world, likely by sea.

Domestic cats have flourished alongside humans ever since, enjoying a status as companion animals. Today, millions of domestic cats can be found around the globe, and different cultures have continued to make art and cultural objects examining our relationships with them. This relationship has its own dark side, however: the spread of domesticated cats has had significant impact on local animals, with billions of reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals killed by free-ranging outdoor cats around the globe each year, leading to growing movements to reshape how we treat our pets.

Whether it’s a growing awareness of our impact on the natural habitats of big cats, our efforts to understand smaller, more reclusive feral felines, or our ability to share resources with our domesticated neighbours, our relationship with cats is destined to continue evolving.