The Story of the Key Marco Cat

The Key Marco Cat.

Artifact Catalogue No. A240915, Department of Anthropology, NMNH, Smithsonian Institution.

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Have you ever heard of the Key Marco Cat? Chances are you may have seen an image of this famous Florida artifact, even if you didn’t know what it was. The Key Marco Cat is a human/feline figurine about six inches high. It was carved from buttonwood by an artisan of the Calusa culture. According to notes from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the figure is dated to AD 1400–1500 or AD 700–1500.

Where is Key Marco and who were the Calusa?

Key Marco is the name of an archaeological site near Marco Island, a city on Florida’s southwest coast. According to the city’s official website, the Calusa people arrived in Florida “at least 4,000 years ago” (or about 2,000 BC). Besides being a “tall, handsome people … known for their fierce and warlike nature,” they were skilled woodworkers, as evidenced by the artifacts that were found in an 1896 excavation.

The Calusa lived on shell mounds and in huts raised above the water. They weren’t welcoming toward European explorers, and in 1521, an expedition led by Ponce de Leon landed in the area and was attacked by Calusa warriors. Ponce de Leon was wounded in the thigh (by a spear or poison arrow—accounts vary) and later died in Cuba.

The Calusa themselves were wiped out by diseases brought by Europeans.

The area of Florida where the
Calusa lived.
By Bryan Strome (www.firstnationseeker.ca)
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

The Key Marco Cat

The 1896 excavation we mentioned was the Pepper-Hearst Expedition, led by an anthropologist named Frank Hamilton Cushing (the expedition was named for its sponsors, Dr. William Pepper and philanthropist Phoebe Hearst).  Cushing excavated at a small muck pond he called the Court of the Pile Dwellers. There he found the remains of buildings, woven mats, pottery, utensils such as spoons, and carved masks and figures, including an alligator head, a deer head, and of course the now-famous cat. Many of the wooden objects had still-vivid paint colors when they were first brought out of the wet conditions that had preserved them. But this was before archaeologists had good conservation techniques for wooden objects, and the painted colors soon faded.

The Key Marco Cat is a kneeling figure that appears to be half-human and half-feline. The feline part has been called a cougar or mountain lion, but it seems more likely (to us at least) that it was based on the mountain lion subspecies known as the Florida panther (Puma concolor coryi). It was carved with shell scrapers and a shark’s tooth and was then “rubbed with a protective layer of animal fat,” (Smithsonian NMNH).

Interestingly, some Native peoples of the North American Southeast have oral histories of underwater panthers who rule the lower world and thunderbirds who rule the upper world. Could the Key Marco Cat be a representation of one of these underwater panthers? That is a question that may never be answered for certain. The figure is believed to have had religious significance to the Calusa, though.

Where the cat is now and where it’s going

This 1989 US Airmail stamp featured
the Key Marco Cat.
Copyright United States Postal Service.
All rights reserved,

The Key Marco Cat is now at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. But later this year, the figure is expected to return to Marco Island along with several other artifacts for “an extended visit” (Naples Daily News) to the Marco Island Historical Museum. The cat will be featured at a grand opening in January 2019.

Meanwhile, in the absence of the actual artifact, the museum has displayed a reproduction by artist Peter Sottong. It will be nice to see the Key Marco Cat go home, even if only temporarily.

Sources

Harriet, Howard Heithaus, “The Year of the Cat: Key Marco Cat Returns, This Time to a Home Built for It,” Naples Daily News, April 21, 2018, https://www.naplesnews.com/story/entertainment/arts/2018/04/21/year-cat-key-marco-cat-returns-time-home-built/523476002/

“History,” Key Marco Cat—Calusa Art Reproductions, https://www.keymarcocat.com/history.html.

“Key Marco,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_Marco

“Old Marco Island,” City of Marco Island Florida, http://www.cityofmarcoisland.com/index.aspx?page=207

“Pepper-Hearst Expedition,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper-Hearst_expedition

Hieroglyphic Cats from Ancient Crete

We stumbled upon an interesting little tidbit earlier this week. At first we didn’t even believe it and thought it must be one of those alternative facts that are so easy to find on the internet. But a little digging brought us to some reputable sources, so we are ready to tell you that the so-called Cretan Hieroglyphic writing system (not related to the more famous Egyptian hieroglyphs) included pictures of cats. This system, from the Mediterranean island of Crete, arose around 2000 BC. It has not been deciphered, so no one is 100% sure what the cat pictures mean—but there is a guess at the end of this post!

Just where is Crete? Follow the red arrow. The island
is roughly southeast of mainland Greece.
Image via Adobe Stock.

The cat pictures

Seal of green jasper with Cretan Hieroglyphic writing
including a stylized cat's head.
Photo by Ingo Pini [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons.

The cat pictures in Cretan Hieroglyphics took different forms. Sometimes a full cat’s body was depicted, sometimes just a stylized cat’s head. In Linear A, the next writing system to come along on Crete, there was still a cat’s head symbol, but it was much more stylized, with something that looks roughly like a head with eyes, pointy ears, and sometimes a mouth. Linear A was used from about 1850 to 1400 BC and overlapped with Cretan Hieroglyphic for many years. Then, in about 1600 BC, came Linear B. Linear B also used a cat’s head, but you sort of have to use your imagination to see the cat. This is because it is basically all ears.

By the way, all three writing systems were named by archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans.

What did the cat figures mean?

Broadly, hieroglyphic writing is any system where the characters are pictures of recognizable things. The individual pictures can represent the thing they depict (a crow symbol could mean “crow”), or they could represent a sound (a crow symbol could mean “caw”—and obviously we are sort of making this up as a general example).

While we don’t know for sure what the cat in Cretan Hieroglyphic writing meant, Pippa Steele of the CREWS Project says we can sort of guess by working backward from Linear B, which has been deciphered. All of these systems are syllabic, so the symbols represent sounds—and the sound that the Linear B cat’s head represents is “ma.” Steele says that the symbol and its sound likely came from Linear A. It’s possible that the Cretan Hieroglyphic cat also stood for “ma” or something very similar.

Detail from a table of Cretan Hieroglyphic signs.
The cat is number 75.
From The Palace of Minos, Sir Arthur Evans.
Digitized by Internet Archive Book Images
[No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons. 

Wouldn’t it just make sense that someone would draw a cat to represent something like the sound a cat makes? And let’s not forget that the ancient Egyptian word for “cat” was “miu,” so who knows—maybe the people of Crete called cats “mau” or “maur” or something.

Versions of the Linear A and B cat signs.
Adapted from illustrations in Steele 2017.

Sources

Steele, Pippa. 2017. “Cats in the Aegean Scripts.” CREWS Project website, August 7. https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/2017/08/08/cats-in-the-aegean-scripts/.

“Linear A and Linear B.” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Linear-A#ref106905

The Ancient Maya Kept Big Cats in Captivity as Early as 400 BC

We have an interesting “big cats in archaeology” news short for you today, as a recent study has indicated that as early as 400 BC, the ancient Maya of Central America had big cats that they kept in captivity.

Some of the ruins at Ceibal, Guatemala.
Photo by Chixuy (2006) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

The first physical evidence of the Maya having a captive big cat

This portion of a mural from Chichen Itza, Mexico, shows a
jaguar grasping a human heart.
Photo via Adobe Stock.

The evidence comes from the site of Ceibal, which is in present-day Guatemala. It was occupied for some 2,000 years, from about 1000 BC to AD 1000. There, archaeologists discovered a mandible and molar believed to be from a jaguar (or possibly a puma). Researchers tested isotopes (different forms of an element’s atoms) of carbon, nitrogen, strontium, and oxygen from these and other animal bones found at the site. The carbon and nitrogen would give clues about what the animal ate, and the strontium and oxygen, which came from tooth enamel, would show where the animal was born and grew up. That analysis showed that, from a young age, the jaguar either ate maize or ate other animals that had eaten maize. A wild cat wouldn’t be expected to have this kind of diet, so it is possible that this jaguar was raised in captivity for ceremonial purposes (i.e., to be sacrificed).  Captive cats had shown up in Maya art before, but this jaguar’s jaw and tooth are the first physical evidence of the Maya keeping a big cat in captivity.

There were dogs too

The same study found that two of the dogs discovered at Ceibal had come from over 100 miles away. These two dogs were from the same time period as the jaguar—about 400 BC—and their presence there is evidence of dogs being traded over long distances by the Maya.

Why are we telling you this?

Because occasionally we like to blog outside the lines to tell you something interesting about our wild cousins, and one should always keep tabs on one’s wild cousins.

Keep track of your wild cousins!
The Maya carved this head of a jaguar ca. 550-950.
Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen (2011) [CC BY 2.5].

Sources

Pappas, Stephanie. 2018. “Big Cats and ‘Ritual’ Dogs Lived in Maya Captivity.” Live Science, March 19. https://www.livescience.com/62061-ritual-dogs-mayan-pyramid.html

Sharpe, Ashley, et al. 2018. “Earliest Isotopic Evidence in the Maya Region for Animal Management and Long-Distance Trade at the Site of Ceibal, Guatemala.” PNAS, March 19. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1713880115

Seven Tidbits on Early Cat Domestication

For years, cat lovers and scientists have believed that cats were first domesticated in ancient Egypt. You may already know this story: The Egyptians began farming and storing grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted the local wildcats, which started hanging around human settlements. Humans encouraged the cats to stick around and eventually made pets of them. The Egyptians went further than that though, believing that the goddess Bastet could take the form of a cat. From Egypt, domestic cats spread to the rest of the world.

But is the traditional story of cat domestication correct?

Well, according to the latest study of cat domestication and dispersal, that original story may be partially correct, but the true picture is more complicated—and more interesting—than that simple tale. This post provides seven brief highlights from the study,[1] which analyzed DNA from ancient and modern cats across a wide temporal and geographic distance. The DNA used for analysis came from Europe, north and east Africa, and southwest Asia, and the time period covered was from about 7000 BC to the present. DNA from 352 ancient cats was analyzed, and modern wildcat DNA was sampled from 28 cats from Bulgaria and east Africa.

What did the researchers find? Here are our chosen tidbits, in roughly chronological order:

1. Cats were first domesticated in the ancient Near East.

Map of the Fertile Crescent. Somewhere
in the red-shaded area (most likely in the
larger eastern bit on the right), cats were
first domesticated.
Original image by NormanEinstein.
Creative Commons: Attribution-ShareAlike.
Via Ancient History Encyclopedia.

You’ve heard of Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, where farming began? Well, according to the DNA analysis by Ottoni and colleagues, that area of southwest Asia is also where domestic cats began sometime in the Neolithic period (8,000 years ago, give or take). Think modern Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Iran. Some of the local wildcats, Felis silvestris lybica, were attracted to the rodents that were attracted to the humans’ stored grain. Eventually, some of those cats were tamed and domesticated.

2. Humans probably began transporting cats from place to place in prehistoric times.

Cats from the Near East may have arrived in southeast Europe by 4400 BC or thereabouts. Some of today’s domestic cats have DNA that came from these Near Eastern cats.

3. There is some evidence to suggest that domesticated cats in Egypt came from southwest Asia.

The idea that the Egyptians got their first cats from the Near East has been suggested before. Now there is evidence (in DNA from ancient cat remains found at a Roman-Egyptian port on the Red Sea and from one Egyptian cat mummy) that this may indeed have happened.

Detail from a painting in the
Tomb of Nebamun, ca. 1350 BC,
Thebes, Egypt.
Public domain image, via Wikimedia Commons.

4. Egyptian cats seem to have become very popular, and this study provides “the first evidence for an African origin for one of the mitochondrial lineages of present-day domestic cats.”

It could be that the Egyptians developed a closer relationship with their cats, leading to cats that were tamer than their Near Eastern cousins. That cat napping on your couch could be descended from one of those Egyptian cats.

5. Humans spread cats throughout the eastern Mediterranean during Classical times.

We’re talking about the time of ancient Greece and Rome. Cats became popular across a wider area during this period, and they were recognized as being able to control rodent populations on ships, so the felines really started to get around. By the 6th century BC, cats were showing up on Greek pottery and coins and on a piece of pottery found at the Etruscan site of Vulci (in modern Italy).

6. Cats were further spread during Medieval times, when ships’ cats went along with humans who were traveling for trade or war.

Some evidence comes from a 7th-century cat found at a Viking port on the Baltic Sea and an 8th-century cat found at an Iranian port. There was also trade in pelts of domestic cats, and this too may also have encouraged cats’ spread.

7. Cats probably lived alongside humans for thousands of years before humans began breeding then for specific physical appearances.

The Arkesilas Cup, a black-figure kylix by the Arkesilas Painter, found at the Etruscan site
 of Vulci, ca. 565-560 BC. The king of Kyrene (far left) watches as men work with trade goods.
Several animals are depicted, including a cat under the king's chair.
© Marie-Lan Nguyen [Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic], via Wikimedia Commons. 

Hey, cats do what they want! This, by the way, is the tidbit that has led to headlines saying cats domesticated themselves. Because basically they did. Ottoni and colleagues looked at a specific gene that determines whether a tabby cat will have a mackerel or blotched coat pattern. Wildcats have a mackerel pattern, and a blotched pattern is seen in some domestic cats. So, the appearance and spread of the blotched pattern can be taken to mean that humans were beginning to influence cats’ physical appearance. In this study, the earliest occurrence of the blotched-tabby version of the gene was from the time of the Ottoman Empire (dated between AD 500 and 1300). The gene turned up later in other areas (AD 1300–1900).

Conclusion

We have been waiting for a study exactly like this--one that answers so many of our questions about where domestic cats actually come from. Next up on our wish list of cat research would be a study of early cats from farther east (India, China, and so on). We don't know if anyone is working on this, but we do hope so.

---

[1] Ottoni et al. “The Paleogenetics of Cat Dispersal in the Ancient World.” Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, 0139 (2017).

Cat News Brief: Look Into Cat Mummy Reveals Something…Smaller Than Expected

Researchers at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen got a small surprise when they used a CAT scan to take a peek at what was inside an ancient Egyptian cat mummy in their collection. Instead of a full-grown cat, what was inside the mummy’s wrappings was actually just a kitten. Its neck had been broken. While we may think of the Egyptians mummifying their dear, departed pets, there also existed an industry that bred cats specifically to be mummified and sold to worshipers as temple offerings, possibly to Bastet. In this case, the seller might have made more money from a large cat than a kitten, so he likely bulked up the mummy to charge a higher price.

However, Jaromir Malek^* has written that, judging from the evidence of other cat mummies, it wasn’t unusual for young cats to be killed and mummified, most likely for sale. So it isn’t clear to us that the seller was cheating the buyer in this case (though he may well have been).

*The Cat in Ancient Egpyt. Revised edition. London: British Museum Press, 2006.

The Turkish Van: An Ancient and Storied Cat Breed

A Turkish Van. They are strong, active cats with a distinctive
color pattern, and they like to swim.
Photo: Zara-arush at Armenian Wikipedia (Transferred from
hy.wikipedia to Commons.) [GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons. 

 Some breeds of cats have been around longer than others, and the breed commonly known as the Turkish Van is one of the world’s oldest. The Turkish Van is, according to the Cat Fanciers’ Association, an ancient breed that has its origins in central and southwest Asia—think Iran, Iraq, and eastern Turkey. Specifically, these cats are thought to have roots in the Lake Van region of Turkey. When you consider that Lake Van is the largest lake in Turkey, perhaps it’s not so surprising that these cats love water.

What is a Turkish Van?

Turkish Vans are cats with a semi-long coat in a specific pattern. They are mostly white, often with coloring only on the head and tail. Some have a mark of color between their shoulder blades as well. The tail has a ringed pattern, which explains a name once given to these cats—white ringtails (they’ve also been called Russian longhairs). The classic coloring one thinks of is white with reddish tail and head markings, but Turkish Vans can also have cream, black, or blue as their secondary color, and yes, they can display tabby or tortoiseshell markings as well.

Lake Van, as seen from the Space Shuttle Challenger
in 1984. The area looks rugged, and it produced a
strong, active breed of cat.
Photo by NASA, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The coat is soft and water resistant, with no undercoat. Some cats will have a thin, shorter summer coat that transforms to a plush, longer coat in winter.

Turkish Vans are known for being active and intelligent. They are strong cats who love to run, and, as we mentioned above, they also like water and will go swimming—on purpose. The CFA describes them as having a “swimmer’s body,” likely to help them catch food in the shallow streams of their area of origin.

And now for the ancient part…

First, a bit of folklore… Legend has it that the Turkish Vans got their color pattern when God blessed them as they left Noah’s Ark. The “thumbprint” some of the cats display between their shoulder blades marks where God touched them as they went by him.

Representations of cats that could be Turkish Vans have shown up in the archaeological record. For example:

• From ca. 5000 BC, near Hacilar, Turkey, figurines of women with cats have been found (or possibly not cats; there is apparently some dispute over this).
• From ca. 1600–1200 BC, some Hittite jewelry featured cats with ringed tails.
• From ca. AD 75, in Armenia, a battle standard from the time of Roman occupation depicts a cat with a ringed tail.

As the story goes, the Turkish Van was first brought to Europe by returning crusaders (ca. 1095–1272). If this is true, it seems that the breed died out in Europe until some 500 years later.

The modern Turkish Van

An Armenian postage stamp (1999) showing a
Turkish Van.
From a drawing by Albert Ketchyan,
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In more modern times, the Turkish Van returned to Europe in the 1950s, thanks to a couple of British photographers. In 1955, Laura Lushington and Sonia Halliday were on assignment from the Turkish government: travel the country and create photographs to entice tourists. In their travels, they ended up with two cats who rode around the country with them and even went swimming with them. These two cats (who were unrelated to one another, by the way) were taken to England, where they produced kittens, thus establishing the start of the Turkish Van breed in Europe.

The breed got full pedigree status in England in 1969 and was first taken to America in the 1970s. Today, they remain rare.

Sources

“Folklore and History.” Turkish Van Cat Club website. http://www.turkishvancatclub.co.uk/folklore.html.

Marcus, Diane. “The Turkish Van.” Cat Fanciers’ Association. http://cfa.org/Breeds/BreedsSthruT/TurkishVan/TVArticle.aspx.

Pickeral, Tamsin. The Elegance of the Cat: An Illustrated History. Hauppage, NY: Barron’s, 2013.

 “7 Facts about Turkish Van Cats.” Mental Floss. http://mentalfloss.com/article/83400/7-facts-about-turkish-van-cats.

“Turkish Van.” Cat Fanciers’ Association. http://cfa.org/breeds/breedssthrut/turkishvan.aspx.

Did Vikings Have Cats? Of Course!

If you follow cats on social media,
you probably saw lots of cats in
Viking helmets late last week. It's
all because of a new DNA study.
Stock image by Chris Brignell, via Adobe Stock.

In case you are not tuned in to the cat news of the week, I will begin this post by telling you about the recent kerfuffle (or should that be kerFLUFFle in this case?) in the ancient-cat world. If you are plugged in to social media and follow cats at all, recently you may have seen your feed flooded with pictures of cats in Viking helmets. That sudden influx of Viking kitties was due to a cat DNA study that got a lot of attention last week. This study, presented at a symposium on biomolecular archaeology, examined DNA from over 200 felines dating from the Mesolithic period (that’s the middle of the Stone Age, before agriculture) up to the 1700s AD. The researchers found that wild cats of a certain lineage were dispersed from the Middle East to early farming communities in the eastern Mediterranean and, much later, cats from Egypt moved into Eurasia and Africa with a lot of help from farmers and seafarers, including Vikings.

I’d like to tell you a lot more about this particular study, but so far I have not been able to lay my paws on anything more than a very brief Nature news bit describing it. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more. (We did learn more. Read the update here.)

Anyway, one fascinating item in the news bit is the mention of cat remains at a Viking site in northern Germany dated to between the 8th century and 11th century. One geneticist is quoted as saying, “I didn’t even know there were Viking cats.” Obviously this person is not an avid reader of The Cuddlywumps Cat Chronicles. Otherwise, he might recall that we have written about Viking cats before (see The Goddess Freya’s Cats).

Who were these Vikings, and why did they have cats?

The Vikings were Scandinavian raiders, colonists, and traders who had their heyday beginning in the 8th century and ending in the 11th century. According to The Viking Answer Lady, the Vikings had cats both to keep rodents in check and as pets. New brides might receive kittens as gifts. We think the kittens would have been both a practical gift to keep mice out of the house and a symbolic gift recalling Freya, the goddess of domesticity and female sexuality.

What kind of cats did the Vikings have?

This is a Skogkatt, or Norwegian Forest Cat. But was the
cat found at that Viking Age site a Skogkatt? Cuddlywumps Cat
Chronicles readers want to know!
Stock image by Summer, via Adobe Stock.

We’d like to just say, “Norwegian Forest Cats,” because that would be so easy, and it makes sense. Called Skogkatt in Norwegian, these are large, strong cats with well-insulated coats (for more, see What Kind of Cat Would Santa Claus Have?). But we don’t have any information that says that the cat whose remains were discovered at that Viking site in Germany was indeed a Skogkatt. 

Two questions we would love to know the answers to are

1. Was that cat a Skogkatt? and
2. When did cats first arrive in Scandinavia?

Once again, curiosity leaves us with more questions than answers!

Were Leopard Cats Domesticated in China 5,000 Years Ago?

Felis silvestris lybica, the

type of wildcat that gave rise
to modern domestic kitties.

By Donovan Reginald Rosevear 

(The carnivores of West Africa).  

[Public domain], via 

Wikimedia Commons.

You’ve probably heard a lot about how cat domestication occurred in ancient Egypt. You may also have heard that all modern domestic cats (including that one walking across your keyboard) are descended from the Near Eastern wildcat, known more formally as Felis silvestris lybica. Perhaps you’ve wondered whether the Near Eastern wildcat is the only species of wildcat ever to be domesticated by humans.

Well, I’m not going to answer that question…exactly. Because it still hasn’t been answered…exactly.

Here’s what’s happened: A new study has looked at some 5,300-year-old cat bones found in excavations of an ancient Chinese village, and according to the researchers, those bones belonged to leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis). Whether those leopard cats were actually “domesticated” or were just living near humans for the easy food is still an open question.

Some background on the cat domestication timeline

There’s been a lot of interest in figuring out just where domestic cats came from. In Egypt, 4,000-year-old paintings seem to depict domestic felines, and a cat burial on Cyprus from some 9,000 to 10,000 years ago seems to indicate that humans and cats were at least interacting by that early time, even if the cats were not fully domesticated.

Then a couple of years ago, a study of eight cat bones excavated from the Chinese agricultural village of Quanhucun showed that the cats were feeding on rodents that were eating grain stored in the village. These bones were dated to about 5,300 years ago, and they indicated that at least two cats were present. One of the cats had lived a good many years, so it must have had a relatively safe and healthy life in the village. Another cat ate more grain than you’d really expect a wildcat to eat, possibly indicating that this cat took food from humans.

So cats at least had a commensal relationship with humans over 5,000 years ago. In other words, the cats got some advantage (i.e., food) from the humans, but they weren’t “pets”; there were still wild.

Near Eastern wildcats...or something else?

1896 illustration of a leopard cat, the "Javan variety."
 From Lloyd's Natural History: A hand-book
to the Carnivora. Part 1, Cats, civets, and mungoose
by Richard Lydekker. Wyman & Sons Limited
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

That’s all very interesting, but nobody knew what kind of cats the Quanhucun cats were. The Near Eastern wildcat is not native to that area of central China, so if the cats turned out to be that species (the species that, you’ll remember, gave rise to the domestic cat prancing on your keyboard), it would mean they’d been introduced from outside. That would raise a bunch of other questions (When? How? By whom?).

But if the Quanhucun cats were a whole different species, a local species, that would show that a second species of wildcat was on the road to domestication those several thousand years ago.

The possibilities, and the results

There are four different small wildcats living in the area today: the Central Asian wildcat, the Chinese mountain cat, the Pallas’s cat, and the leopard cat (specifically, the North Central Chinese subspecies of leopard cat). To find out which of these cat species might have lived with humans “back in the day,” the authors of the new paper compared the lower jaws (mandibles) of five “archaeological” cats to modern domestic and wild cats. The archaeological cat mandibles came from Quanhucun and two other sites in the central part of China. The researchers also looked at five archaeological mandibles from Cyprus to definitively identify their species. The Cypriot mandibles had been dated to 9,000–9,500 years old.

The title of this post has already told you the results: The Chinese cats showed “highly significant similarity” to modern leopard cats. This means they were in all likelihood leopard cats; the North Central China subspecies of leopard cat still lives in that area, and the species in general is known to adapt to human environments. In fact, the leopard cat has been bred with a modern domestic cat to produce the domestic Bengal cat.

The Cypriot cats were identified as Near Eastern wildcats, with 94% to 100% probability. That sounds pretty certain to me.

A leopard cat in the Bronx Zoo.
By Stavenn (Own work)
[GFDL, CC-BY-SA-3.0,  or CC BY 2.5],
via Wikimedia Commons

Domestic or commensal?

Now that we know the ancient Chinese cats were “locals,” we have to ask whether they actually lived with humans (domestic) or just hung around for the easy food (commensal). According to the study authors, “the leopard cat most likely became a commensal species” at the sites where the bones were found. Yes, the extensive wear on the teeth of two mandibles from Quanhucun suggests that the “cat(s) may have been fed by humans.” And then there’s the complete cat skeleton found at a site called Wuzhuangguoliang. The careful treatment of the body could suggest that this cat—and perhaps others—had some kind of closer relationship with at least one human in the village. Also, the archaeological mandibles are on the small side in comparison to modern leopard cats; supposedly, domestic animals tend to be smaller than their wild forebears.

That evidence points to domestication, but… Well, we just don’t know for sure. At over 5,000 years’ distance, it’s hard to know if those leopard cats kept mostly to themselves as they furtively hunted rats in human villages, or if they cozied up to the humans for free food and maybe a nice, soft place to sleep.

Perhaps a new find will answer that question someday.

Source

Vigne et al. (2016). Earliest “Domestic” Cats in China Identified as Leopard Cat (Prionailurus bengalensis). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147295

Read more

A Cat Sailed to Cyprus

A Craftsman, a Cat, and a Gazelle Go into a Cemetery

Of Cats and Humans: 5,300 Years Together and Still You Know Nothing 

A Pair of Lion-Headed Goddesses from Ancient Egypt

Wordless Wednesday

Lion-Headed Goddess

Small silver figure representing Wadjet, a goddess of Lower Egypt.
There is a large rearing cobra at the top of her head.
In her left hand, the goddess holds a protective ritual instrument
with a lioness head.

Egypt, c. 1069–664 BC.

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD.

Lion-Headed Goddess in front of Obelisk

A lion-headed goddess seated in front of an obelisk
(a symbol of the sun god Re).

Bronze. Egypt, c. 664–342 BC.

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD.