Paul Crowl
Fri, Jun-29-07, 17:17
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6251434.stm
Domestic cats around the world can trace their origins
back to the Middle East's Fertile Crescent, according
to a genetic study in Science journal.
They may have been domesticated by early farming
communities, experts say.
The study suggests the progenitors of today's cats
split from their wild counterparts more than 100,000
years ago - much earlier than once thought.
At least five female ancestors from the region gave
rise to all the domestic cats alive today,
scientists believe.
This is one of the most significant discoveries in recent
years in the subject of human origins.
Perhaps at last we can get rid of the notion of humans before
~12 kya existing in small groups of peripatetic
hunter-gatherers.
Like so many other ideas in PA, it has long been ridiculous,
but it is so well established that it has been hard to shift.
One thing, that such a society could NOT do, was to keep cats.
As everyone who has a cat knows, they are not tied to people,
but to places, and so long as they are fed, and have a
comfortable place to sleep, they will happily stay around.
This evidence shows that humans have LONG had permanent
settlements -- i.e houses, villages, and possibly towns, in
which they stayed for the whole year.
At the minimum, one such society has had a continuous
existence over the past 100 Kyr, obviously with a fair number
of settlements. Although it is much more likely that there
were dozens or hundreds of such societies.
However, the 100 Kyr date for the domestication of the cat is
very much a minimum. It merely tells us for how far back the
ancestry of the _present_ set of domestic cats can be traced.
If we could sample those alive at (say) 70 kya, we might find
a some with a domestic ancestry of (say) 80 Kyr. In other
words, it is very likely that hominids have _always_ had small
cats in their settlements (i.e. virtually since the origin of
bipedalism). They would simply have been part of the hominid
ecology, in the way that nearly all species live with a range
of parasites and co-dependents.
Paul.
Domestic cats around the world can trace their origins
back to the Middle East's Fertile Crescent, according
to a genetic study in Science journal.
They may have been domesticated by early farming
communities, experts say.
The study suggests the progenitors of today's cats
split from their wild counterparts more than 100,000
years ago - much earlier than once thought.
At least five female ancestors from the region gave
rise to all the domestic cats alive today,
scientists believe.
This is one of the most significant discoveries in recent
years in the subject of human origins.
Perhaps at last we can get rid of the notion of humans before
~12 kya existing in small groups of peripatetic
hunter-gatherers.
Like so many other ideas in PA, it has long been ridiculous,
but it is so well established that it has been hard to shift.
One thing, that such a society could NOT do, was to keep cats.
As everyone who has a cat knows, they are not tied to people,
but to places, and so long as they are fed, and have a
comfortable place to sleep, they will happily stay around.
This evidence shows that humans have LONG had permanent
settlements -- i.e houses, villages, and possibly towns, in
which they stayed for the whole year.
At the minimum, one such society has had a continuous
existence over the past 100 Kyr, obviously with a fair number
of settlements. Although it is much more likely that there
were dozens or hundreds of such societies.
However, the 100 Kyr date for the domestication of the cat is
very much a minimum. It merely tells us for how far back the
ancestry of the _present_ set of domestic cats can be traced.
If we could sample those alive at (say) 70 kya, we might find
a some with a domestic ancestry of (say) 80 Kyr. In other
words, it is very likely that hominids have _always_ had small
cats in their settlements (i.e. virtually since the origin of
bipedalism). They would simply have been part of the hominid
ecology, in the way that nearly all species live with a range
of parasites and co-dependents.
Paul.