Genomes Explain Why Your Cat Almost Likes You as Much as You Like Your Cat
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iStock/Thinkstock(ST. LOUIS) — If you’re a “cat person,” your lineage can be traced back about 9,000 years to a time when people started letting felines hang around the house.
However, as compared to dogs, who became pets 20,000 years earlier than that, cats are still considered semi-domesticated, which might explain why so many like to be left alone or let outside to wander about.
Study senior author Wes Warren from The Genome Institute at Washington University says that today’s cats are obviously related to the wild cats of ancient times that people, particularly farmers, would first use to catch rodents.
However, upon examining their DNA, Warren was a little shocked to discover evidence of the modern cat’s domestication where the genome is different from wild cats in the behavioral areas of memory fear and reward-seeking.
Although wild cats got the idea that they were welcomed to co-habitate, eventually people sought out felines that weren’t quite as feral, which led to breeding for colors and patterns.
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