The First Cats
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Hi, Tristan here and I have an exciting announcement. The Ancients has been invited to open the London Podcast Festival. We will be recording our very first live show on Thursday the 5th of September at 7pm at King's Place and being the first live show where we want it to be extra special, so I've invited a friend of the podcast, Professor Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, to join me on stage where we will be diving into the captivating story of the Tower of Babel.

from its first mention in the book of Genesis to the real-life great ancient Babylonian structure that it was based on. Of course, the ancients is nothing without you, so we want you to be there in the audience taking part and asking us your burning questions.

Tickets for the festival always sell fast, so book yourself a seat now at www.kingsplace.co.uk/whatson or click the link in the show notes of this episode. I really hope to see you there. Cats. These much-loved furry friends of ours have brightened people's lives for millennia. And it was the same in ancient times.

They were pets. They were pest control against rats. They even, in some cases, had close links to religion. Think ancient Egypt and their cat goddess Bastet. The ancient history of the domestic cat is a fascinating one. So what do we know about their origins? About how, where and why they were domesticated? It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

And today, what you might remember, a few months ago, at the start of 2024, we released an episode all about the first dogs with Dr. Angela Perry. That episode proved incredibly popular. And today, joining me to talk all about early cats, their domestication, their importance in ancient Egypt, and much more, I was delighted to interview Professor James Serpell, an anthrozoologist from the University of Pennsylvania and expert on the domestic cat.

Enjoy, folks. Whether you're a dog person or a cat person, and let's be frank, you can be both, it's time to delve into the story of the first cats.

James, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. It's nice to be here. We have in the past done an episode all about dog domestication and the first dogs and given how popular that episode was, and we wanted to do it anyway, it only seemed right to do the follow-up episode all about the first cats and the story of the domestication of cats and what is known so far. But James, this

This feels like it's quite a different story to that of dog domestication, that of cats. Is it a pretty different trajectory? Probably. But we don't actually know, obviously, because it all happened about 10,000 years ago, when

Nobody was writing this stuff down. But what we do know is that the cat was domesticated somewhere in the Middle East, the Near East, probably somewhere in Saudi Arabia. That is based on genetic evidence. So people have compared the DNA of cats from various parts of the Middle East with modern domestic cats and also cats.

early cat remains. And it looks like, based on that, the cat originated somewhere around what they sometimes call the Levant or Saudi Arabia. And that is actually a common site for a lot of animal domestication in that region. So the cat was part of that process, but it was quite early.

It's quite interesting because it's funny that you mentioned that area and we'll explore that more, but I've been doing quite a bit of work recently on Petra and the Nabataeans and the story of the camel domestication in that area of the world too. So it's interesting that you do have these various animals that become so closely entwined with the human story that their domestication stories do seem to originate from this same rough area in the world. Yeah. It's often referred to by archaeologists as one of the great centers in domestication. So

So people were domesticating plants as well in this region at the same time. So it was a sort of cluster. How interesting. And you mentioned there in your first answer, James, like the importance of genetics. Is this an evolving area of research? You know, they're constantly, consistently discovering more with new scientific advancements coming to the fore. Yeah.

Yes, to some extent, although the cat gets much less attention than the dog. The dog gets enormous amounts of attention. Endless studies seem to be coming out comparing DNA for modern wolves, modern dogs, ancient wolves, ancient dogs, trying to kind of get a picture of where dogs came from. And some of that, as I say, has happened with cats, but much less.

The cat is an interesting animal because the wild cat, this sort of ancestor, has a huge distribution across the world. So it spreads all the way from East Asia to Europe to Southern Africa. So it's a massive, massive distribution. But the domestication seems to have been relatively confined.

to the Middle East and involve just one subspecies of the wild cat, the so-called Felis sylvestris libica, which is the subspecies that inhabits that region. It's often called the North African wild cat, but actually its distribution spreads into Western Asia as well.

Do we know when the first cat species emerge in the world and how far back we go? Oh, millions of years to sort of first cat species, obviously. The distribution of the wildcat, I mean, the wildcat itself is probably six to 10 million years old. It's an old species. It's been around for a long time and very successful, like a small solitary hunting cat that lives primarily of things like birds and rodents and reptiles and that sort of thing that it can catch.

And they're all over the place, or at least they used to be all over the place. Now they're sort of going out of business in the wild to some extent. But the domestic version, of course, has been hugely successful and is now spread all over the world with humans.

Do we know much about the divergence of these different cats' lineages and then the subspecies of these various lineages? Do we know the story or at least a rough idea of how you get ultimately to the wild cats and then the domestic cat over those millions of years?

I mean, so geneticists have looked at those relationships between different cat families. So there are various different cat families. There are the big cats and there are the cats like the lynxes and the whole group of South American cats like the ocelot and the margay and those.

They all separated off from this sort of main cat lineage very early on. And the wild cat is one of those stems, if you like, one of those branches from that sort of main cat lineage. They're all small cats. They're all usually under five to ten pounds in weight.

And they cover virtually every habitat in Asia and Europe and Africa. A very, very successful little cat. And it's kind of a mystery as to why humans glommed onto this one subspecies in the Middle East, except that whoever lived there seemed to be in the business of domesticating stuff. And so they were domesticating cats, they were domesticating other species at the same time.

You've already mentioned how these wildcats, they're a very, very successful species and spread all across the Eurasian continent. And do we know before that period of domestication, which we're about to get onto, do we know much about their lifestyles, the lifestyles of these wildcats, their diets, the environments, shelters and so on? Do we know much about that from surviving evidence?

Well, we know it from existing populations of wild cats around the world. So they mostly have a very similar lifestyle, largely solitary. They have territories, home ranges that they forage in. They defend those territories from other cats. The female cats have relatively small territories and males have very large territories that tend to take in several female territories. And, you know, they breed annually.

produce a small number of kittens, not usually very large litters. They're quite well adapted to arid conditions, sort of desert-type conditions. Cats need relatively little water, so they're very dry adapted. And pretty much, you know, what they eat is the same wherever the cats occur. They eat rodents, birds that they can catch, small birds that they can catch, reptiles, occasionally amphibians, things like frogs.

That's about the story for cats. They're all very, very similar. I mean, James, because that solitary thing is kind of one I wanted to focus on. Because remember when I did an interview with Dr. Angela Perry about the first dogs and with early dogs and wolves, of course, they hunted. They're in packs. They're all together. But with cats and wild cats, they're quite solitary. So, I mean, once again, that must all play its part in the story of domestication if we're not talking about large, almost herds and groups of cats coming into contact with humans.

but one or two. That must affect the whole process of the domestication happening. I think it did. And I think the cats are definitely homebodies, so they stay in their own territories. They don't tend to stray out of their territories. They know their territories very well. They mark their territories with various scents so that other cats know where people are, so to speak. And I think

That made it probably very unlikely that the cat would have been domesticated at a time when humans were living as hunter-gatherers, solely as hunter-gatherers, because hunter-gatherers tend to move about all the time. They're nomadic, semi-nomadic. That would be incompatible with the cat's lifestyle. So I think the cat was domesticated, and the evidence from archaeology suggests this.

After people began to settle down in permanent villages, I think that was a very critical step in terms of Cantonese education. People settling down, people starting to practice agriculture and that type of thing.

So this is an interesting time, isn't it, James, with the advent of farming in that area of the world that you highlighted, Saudi Arabia, the fertile crescent. So this can stretch back some up to more than 10,000 years ago. And is that when, when you get, you know, the hunter gatherers, less mobile people settling in these communities?

Is it almost very quickly in the surviving evidence that's available that you start to see evidence of human interactions with cats in the surviving archaeology? You do. Some of the earliest evidence is quite interesting that shows that people actually took cats with them when they went on ocean voyages. So there's some very early evidence from the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. And there are a couple of burial sites, one very famous one at the location called

Curakitiya, where they found a cat buried with a couple of people. And it had obviously been deliberately buried with them. It wasn't just an accidental burial. And when people have animals buried with them like that, it often suggests that there was some kind of attachment between the people and the animal in life. So whoever buried the people decided to put the cat with them. So the cat could go with them, as it were, to the next world.

There have been found two burials of cats like this in Cyprus. And the interesting thing is that there's no native cats on Cyprus. So the native wild cat never made it to Cyprus.

So really the only explanation for how it got there was that it came with the first human settlers on boats. So those settlers we know came from either southern Turkey or the area around Syria or the Lebanon probably. Most likely that's where they came from because that's the sort of closest region.

Evidently, they brought their cats with them, so there must have been quite a strong attachment to those cats. This was all about 9,000 years ago, which is very early in the cat's history. It does beg the question, what was it in the human psyche of these early farmers, these first settlers, that they're starting to settle down in this area of the eastern Mediterranean, let's say, before voyages to Cyprus and so on, that they start seeing cats in the surrounding environment?

and then decide, you know, almost kind of adopt the cat or bring in the cat, start off that process of domestication. What do you think is the incentive, the motivation behind this domestication? Well, again, it's hard to say for sure, but there are a couple of theories. One theory is that, you know, if you start farming and you're storing things like grain, then you're going to be attracting rodents to your settlements and the rodents are going to be eating your grain.

And so having cats around would be a great deterrent against the rodents. And maybe people recognized early on that if you're going to be farming, it's worth having cats around just to keep the rodents off. And we have actually historical records from parts of Africa of people actually

capturing wildcats and keeping them in their homes or around their granaries just for that purpose. So it seems not unlikely that people in this early period were doing the same kind of thing.

The other theory is that these people, who we don't know that much about, I mean, we know a bit about their material culture and so on, what they were eating, this kind of thing, but we don't know much about their psychology. But it appears that they liked capturing and keeping animals as, you know, quote-unquote pets. So it was a very early, about 14,000-year-old burial from somewhere in Jordan, I believe,

where they found some people buried with a fox, a pet fox. Now, we know that people didn't domesticate foxes at this time, but it's circumstantial evidence that these people were in the habit

of capturing probably young animals, baby animals, and bringing them home, looking after them, and keeping them just for enjoyment purposes. We don't know why they particularly like doing this. The suggestion is that it was a common activity. And some of these animals fell by the wayside historically. We never domesticated foxes.

But others became domesticated through a process of just being breeding within the human media, if you like. But is there a theory that maybe the cats, they domesticated themselves in a way because of this new way of living and because of people settling down and the opportunities for food in the form of rodents and so on that agricultural communities provided?

Yeah, it's quite possible. That idea of the cat that walked by itself goes back to Rudyard Kipling and people like that who wrote about this in his Just So stories. And I think, yes, it's possible, but it did require at least two things. First, humans had to tolerate

cats coming into their settlements. And often humans aren't very tolerant of wild animals coming into their settlements. And the other thing is, of course, these people also had dogs. Dogs would have imposed a barrier to cats coming into their settlements. My personal belief is that humans played a very active role in this domestication process. It wasn't just a passive thing where cats domesticated themselves. They got a lot of help from humans.

And I don't think they would have been domesticated without that help, just because all we know about humans' attitudes to wild animals and how they treat wild animals tends to be antithetical to domestication. They tend to kill wild animals or make use of their products or their fur or their meat or whatever it is.

To domesticate something, you've got to get past that and actually sort of, as it were, bring animals into the human situation and rear them as members of the family and that kind of thing. So you develop this bond between the people and the animal. And we have evidence for that bond, for example, from these burials in Cyprus, where clearly people cared about their cats enough to put them on the boat with them. And these weren't big boats. These were small boats.

and actually travel quite a distance across the ocean with their cats. And to me, that suggests that there was a strong attachment between people and their cats from a very early stage in their domestication.

and that the rodent-eating component was kind of a secondary benefit, if you like. And, you know, later in the history of the cat, we see very, very strong evidence for extremely strong emotional attachments between people and cats. I'm thinking here of a place like ancient Egypt, where people were absolutely obsessed with cats, and that went far beyond the fact that they ate rodents. It became a sort of religious cult.

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Something that I completely forgot about then is that these settlements, many of them would have already had dogs in them. So was that another barrier? Do you think that these early settlements

these early farmers would have had to overcome and the cats to overcome in that domestication process, the ability for cats and dogs to try and live side by side. Yeah, I think the issue here is that, you know, it's difficult to tame wild animals, especially if you get them when they're adults. So by the time they're adults, they're

They're not untamable, but it's very, very difficult. It's a very long, prolonged process and you have to be very, very patient. And I don't suspect our ancestors at this time had that level of patience. It's much easier if you can get a kitten or a puppy that is very young when they're still able to form social bonds with new individuals, even individuals of a different species.

And so I think probably a step that was critical to the domestication of the cat, or indeed the dog, was the ability to obtain very young puppies or kittens and bring them into the human settlement and rear them as part of the human family.

And if that family already has dogs in it, then dogs also become part of that family from the young cat's point of view. And we see this now. When I got two young kittens, we had a middle-aged dog, and the kittens immediately bonded with the dog. The dog was not thrilled with this, but he grew sort of vaguely attached to the kittens over time.

But the kittens got very attached to him and would follow him around the house and this kind of thing. So those two cats grew up sort of thinking of dogs as being like siblings. And I think this is very critical to the domestication process. You have to have these bonds develop early with the members of the household or the family in order to go to the next step, which is to have a, as it were, a breeding population of cats living with people.

who no longer have to find a mate from outside the community. So you're then getting genetic isolation of that domestic population.

And then you can see changes in that population over time, genetic changes, that makes them better adapted to living in this human social group. James, you just mentioned there your two cats and your dog. It seems that's also got an interesting strand for researchers today is that you can try and learn more about the behaviors of people and cats back in ancient times from looking at the behaviors of cats and dogs today with humans. And

That also seems an interesting research strand through which to try and learn more about events happening more than 2,000 years ago. Up to a point. We have to accept that modern cats and ancient cats aren't the same animals. There have been lots of changes in genetics and their personality that have enabled them to adapt well to living with people. And these early cats were probably less well-adapted. And the same goes for the dog. But yes, you can draw some inferences. I mean, sort of basic things like

This early socialization process is pretty much universal among young animals. So they go through a stage early in development when they form their primary social bonds. I think what humans did, which was quite clever, although I don't think they realized what they were doing at the time, was to...

exploit that socialization process in order to form attachments with wild animals, which then became, over time, became permanent. How long does it take for the wildcat, for the libica, to be fully domesticated by farming communities back in ancient times? How long are we talking? It really depends what you mean by fully domesticated. So

Some people would argue that the cat still isn't fully domesticated. In other words, cats still find it relatively easy to become feral. In other words, to revert back to living like a wild cat.

And indeed, you know, many of our urban areas are full of these sort of semi-feral stray cats, which are relatively unapproachable. They kind of avoid close human contact, but they're still out there and they're dependent on people primarily for food and leftovers and stuff like that.

but they can still go out and hunt for themselves. So the cat's an interesting animal. Now most of our common domestic short-haired and long-haired cats are different from the wild cat, but they still have this capacity to revert in a way that dogs don't. So it'd be hard to imagine a French poodle or a bulldog being successful as a wild predator, whereas cats

Certainly one of my cats is absolutely lethal, you know. If we let him out, he's very dangerous to the local wildlife because he's very quick and very predatory. If he actually ate what he caught, he would manage perfectly well on his own. Because I want to get towards the Egyptians. I mean, by the time of ancient Egypt, Bronze Age Egypt, does the cat seem at least a bit more domesticated, if not fully domesticated, than it had been a few thousand years earlier?

Yeah, and I think you can say it is clear, for example, that the ancient Egyptians were actually breeding cats. So they had, as it were, close populations of cats and were breeding from and producing, in that sense, fully domesticated cats that were entirely dependent on people for food and care and all the rest of it. It's interesting to me that through the cat's history,

So often it has had to revert back to being semi-wild in order to survive. So it has this sort of slightly, at times, tenuous relationship with people. We can see that coming forward through history. But in ancient Egypt, they had a very close relationship with people. We know that there were temple catteries, that the high priests were breeding cats, or producing cats in very large numbers.

So that's the kind of situation where most archaeologists would say the animal is fully domesticated. Do we know where this great ancient Egyptian reverence for cats... I mean, James, do we have any idea where it comes from? Why of all creatures, the Egyptians choose the cat and have this great love and almost kind of worship of it?

Yes, to some extent. But the Egyptians, again, were unusual in the sense that they worshipped a lot of different types of animals because they saw those animals as being earthly representatives of gods and goddesses. And so these animals acquired sacred status. The cat was one of them. Egyptians had cats around their homes before they became gods.

technically very sacred. We know that. There are early remains of cats from ancient Egypt. Clearly in sort of human settings, we have frescoes showing Egyptian families

you know, sitting down to lunch with cats sitting underneath their chairs and things like that. So we know that cats were part of Egyptian society. But at some point, the pharaoh of the time, who seems to have originated in Libya, introduced this cult of Bastet. If we look at early Egyptian cult of Bastet, she's associated with a lioness, not a cat.

But at this particular juncture in Egyptian history, this Egyptian pharaoh introduced a style of cult of Bastet that was different and which placed heavy emphasis on the domestic cat. And Bastet's attributes were things like motherhood, female sexuality, all kinds of interesting things to do with women and that kind of thing.

The cat seemed to be her earthly representative. People decided that the cat was going to be the image of Bastet. Supposedly in her temple, there was a huge statue of a cat, now lost, of course. The remains of the

The temple at Boubastis in the northern part of Egypt is now just a pile of rubble, basically. It's been completely destroyed. But we know from sort of contemporary accounts written primarily by the writer Herodotus, Greek writer Herodotus, who visited Egypt at that time, that there was a big temple complex at Boubastis.

And people came from miles around annually, a big festival. It was kind of lewd and licentious festival, supposedly. Herodotus is rather... Yes, he likes a story or two, doesn't he? He's kind of reticent about the details.

of this cult, but certainly the implication was that it was kind of a big, almost orgiastic kind of thing that happened annually. And everybody came sailing down the Nile to the temple at Lubastis where there were big celebrations and festivities and so on. And this was the sort of high point of the cat cult in ancient Egypt. It faded gradually after that. So by the time of sort of the Roman period, it still existed, but it wasn't as all-encompassing as it had been.

Well, you also mentioned there, which was interesting, this kind of association with the cat with women in ancient Egyptian society. Do you think this is something that's reflected in ancient Near Eastern societies of women and the cat, or is that not clear? No.

It's not clear. I mean, the cat was vaguely associated with the Greek goddess Artemis and the Roman goddess Diana. Artemis was supposedly a huntress, so she was interested in hunting, but she also had dogs.

You know, it's hard to say exactly the details of much of this religious belief is lost. We don't really know enough about it. We just have these kind of anecdotes from visitors to Egypt who, you know, testify to how important cats were. There was a later Roman writer visited Egypt. He described how you have somebody, there was a case in which a Roman soldier killed a cat.

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The Egyptians ganged up on this guy and killed him because he killed a cat. So we know from that clear evidence that cats were still very, very important. And you didn't treat them in that kind of way. But the details of their religious beliefs are very obscure. But it's clear that there was something about the cat that, in the Egyptian mind at least, made this connection between cats and New England.

Cats are very good mothers, so mother cats are extremely attentive to their kittens, and this may have been a factor. Female cats also come across as very promiscuous because they will, so to speak, invite the attentions of several males when they're on heat. So the males will sort of, as it were, queue up the mate with the females.

And maybe that had some resonance with the Egyptians. I don't know. We really don't have any idea. But it was interesting that they should make this very clear link between Wundern and Kax.

I'd like to quickly, if you don't mind, go back to Saudi Arabia, because you mentioned near the start how this seems to be an important origins point for the domestication of the cats and the importance of these desert environments. So do we know much about the cats, the early domesticated cat, and ancient Saudi Arabian societies? Not really, except that we do know that Muhammad approved of cats. He did not approve of dog, but he approved of cats.

And he supposedly had cats himself, or at least a cat. You still find that to some extent in Arab countries, that cats are kind of admired. Dogs, less so unless they're hunting dogs. Hunting dogs, it's okay, you can admire hunting dogs. But just your average street dog is not a perfect dog.

And also another area where it seems that cats are very highly thought of and are seen as a symbol of good luck is, of course, in the Far East, in China, James. Do we know much about the domestication of cats in the Far East? Did it differ to elsewhere? Probably not. Cats got to the Far East quite early in history. So there are archaeological records of cats getting there pretty early on, I think about 7,000 years ago.

So the spread of cats from the Near East, assuming that's where they originated, seems to have happened quite quickly. And there's also evidence that cats reached the Indus Valley civilization of India quite early on. This is a lovely example of that.

A set of drying roof tiles they found with cat footprints running across the roof tiles, closely followed by dog footprints, which somebody uncovered in ancient India. Of course, later on, you get this more infamous association of cats with things like sorcery, particularly in European mindset, and witchcraft.

Do we know when cats develop a more infamous side to them, at least in certain people's beliefs? Do we know when that starts to emerge? Not exactly, but around the 12th century, we start to read references to associations between cats and witchcraft. So I think the evidence suggests that the Inquisition, the Roman Catholic Inquisition, was largely responsible for this change.

tendency to demonize cats. The ostensible role of the Inquisition was to root out heretical non-Christian beliefs from Europe. And so we could maybe have a picture in this early medieval period of the Christian religion vying with older cult-type religions in Europe. And it's possible that some of these older cult-type religions included cats as a

Again, a representative of spiritual powers, supernatural powers. And so cats became the focus for sort of antipathy. So a lot of early heretical sects like the Cathars, those groups were associated with cat worship, which is...

Probably highly unlikely that they had anything to do with Catholic worship, but this was like kind of propaganda that was put out by the Catholic Church to encourage people to demonize anybody who worshipped as a Cathar.

It's a really curious idea. Descriptions of early witchcraft, especially on the continent of Europe, often talk about people riding on the backs of giant cats going to their Sabbath ceremonies, their witch's Sabbaths. They talk about people, witches, turning themselves into cats in order to move about at night, incognito, so to speak, to perform various nefarious activities. So it was a very kind of insidious idea.

propaganda that they were using to both demonize cats and demonize the people who kept cats, which were often isolated old ladies and things like that, who then got accused of witchcraft, would often suffer very unpleasant consequences as a result. So it was a very, I see it as being the product of a very patriarchal religious establishment,

trying to suppress ancient cults that perhaps were less patriarchal, more matriarchal perhaps, and somehow the cat got caught up in that. It became this sort of symbol of satanic worship, a symbol of evil, a symbol of bad luck, and so on. But it's

Unfortunately, you know, the details are lost in the missing tone. There you go. There you go. That interesting legacy of ancient cat cults and worship. And one of them we've already discussed, of course, in Bastet. I mean, James, this has been an absolutely fantastic chat. It's so interesting how, yes, as you've highlighted, there are differences with how cats used in ancient times and differences between cats back some 2,000, 3,000 years ago and cats today. But at the same time, it's still fascinating to think that

there are some similarities with how we interact with pet cats today. You know, how we view them as pets, like people may well have done maybe as far back as 10,000 years ago and cared for them and cherish them deeply. It's that fascinating. I mean, cats and dogs, they're a great way to, to realize how, yes, people in prehistoric and ancient times, they are different to us today, but you can also see similarities in behavior too. Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely. And still a lot of prejudice against cats and people who keep cats. Interestingly, you know, just J.D. Vance the other day saying things like liberals are dominated by single cat ladies, that kind of thing. It's making that mental association that tends to attribute bad things to people who keep cats or attribute bad ones to cats. And it's one of those strange legacies that just persists in the population and continues

seems to resist going away because actually now the cat outnumbers the dog in terms of popularity in the western world at least there are more cats than there are dogs well there you go and also i don't buy into you either a dog person or a cat person i think that you can be both james this has been a fantastic chat and it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today you're very welcome

Well, there you go. There was Dr. James Serpaul talking all things the first cats, the domestication of the cat over thousands of years with a focus on societies in the ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Egypt and so on. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

A thank you also to Ancients listener Kerry who suggested, who recommended we do this episode and I'm really happy we could make it a reality. Now, if you have an episode suggestion for the Ancients, then feel free to send it my way. You can contact me at ancientstristan on Instagram, just drop me a message, or you can send us an email at theancientsathistoryhit.com.

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