--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "alexandru_mg3" <alexandru_mg3@...>
copied a BBC story, saying:
"However, the new results show the house cat lineage is far older.
Ancestors of domestic cats are now thought to have broken away from
their wild relatives and started living with humans as early as
130,000 years ago."
But (as apparently happens much too frequently with science
stories) BBC got it wrong. I'm a subscriber to Science and was able
to read the real article online. One of the forks on the cladogram of
Felis sylvestris is labeled 131,000 yrs., but this way precedes the
domestic cat. The authors find that wild cats fall into five groups
native to Africa, Asia, and Europe, and that all domestic cats fit
into the group that inhabits the Middle East. They suggest that
domestication occurred when cats found a great supply of rodents in
granaries, soon after the invention of agriculture. There has been a
lot of interbreeding of wild and domestic cats wherever they coexist,
but the authors find no evidence for a second domestication (unlike
horses for example, where when the idea of taming spread, people
rounded up their own wild races).
It is an interesting question why cats weren't common enough in
the ancient Indo-European world to have a general I.E. name.
Dan