Who Domesticated Who?

Recent findings - genetic and archaeological - suggest that cats first became domesticated not in Egypt about 3,600 years ago, as had been thought, but much earlier, in the fertile crescent some 10,000 years ago, co-temporaneous with the birth of agriculture. And we didn't adopt them: they adopted us. The surplus grain attracted the mice, and the mice attracted the cats, and because they kept the pests in check, and were kind of cute, people tolerated them and let them live indoors.

In a study reported in Scientific American, five genetic clusters of wildcat were identified:

Four of these lineages corresponded neatly with four of the known subspecies of wildcat and dwelled in specific places: F. silvestris silvestris in Europe, 

in China, F. s. ornata in Central Asia and F. s. cafra in southern Africa. The fifth lineage, however, included not only the fifth known subspecies of wildcat—F. s. lybica in the Middle East—but also the hundreds of domestic cats that were sampled, including purebred and mixed-breed felines from the U.S., the U.K. and Japan. In fact, genetically, F. s. lybica wildcats collected in remote deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were virtually indistinguishable from domestic cats. That the domestic cats grouped with F. s. lybica alone among wildcats meant that domestic cats arose in a single locale, the Middle East, and not in other places where wildcats are common.

"Domesticated", though, as any cat owner can attest, is maybe not quite the right word. Until very recently, and then only for show purposes, there was never any effort to breed them for particular traits. 

Unlike dogs, which exhibit a huge range of sizes, shapes and temperaments, house cats are relatively homogeneous, differing mostly in the characteristics of their coats. The reason for the relative lack of variability in cats is simple: humans have long bred dogs to assist with particular tasks, such as hunting or sled pulling, but cats, which lack any inclination for performing most tasks that would be useful to humans, experienced no such selective breeding pressures.

I wonder if it's really as simple as that, or if there may not be some underlying genetic difference in terms of ability to be changed morphologically and behaviourally between dogs and cats: another facet of that feline refusal to be changed, and to always walk by itself.

Comments

[dearieme]

In our house we eat Dinner, except for the cats who prefer High Tea.

[Rafe]

I thought feline phenotypes where less sensitive to artificial selection relative to dogs because dogs have plenty of redundant gene repeats. Deleterious alterations in a particular gene would be potentially insulated from causing harm as there would be redundancy.

[Mick H]

Sounds plausible.