--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> On 2007-07-03 20:40, alexandru_mg3 wrote:
>
> > I don't see what argument can add to our discussion : this
taxonomy of
> > subspecies, species , group of species that can interbreed, etc...
> >
> > The real split is defined today Only using the genetic markers.
>
> Marius,
>
> The original question was not how we define a species but whether
> genetic studies suggest that cats were domesticted more than
100,000
> years ago. The answer is "no".
Based On, what?
> The author of the BBC News article
> misunderstood and, consequently, misrepresented the findings
reported in
> Science.
I understood this.
There are 4 peoples here at least that still think that I still
make reference to the BBC article as argument.
I used only my own logical arguments.
> Both genetics
Based On what? This is quite new for me.
> and archaeology roughly agree in dating the
> domestication of cats to the early Holocene (some 10,000 yers ago)
and
> locating it in the Middle East.
There are cat bones in Cyprus that were found together with human
bones, 9400 BC or ago, something like this, if I remember well. I
could search on Google for the exact date.
But this is irrelevant.
I need to ask you:
What is the oldest PIE-bone (found) ?
Is this the PIE age?
See also below the dog story...
> locating it in the Middle East. Of course that's still makes
> domesticated cats much older than PIE, and even if the IEs had no
> contact with peoples who kept cats, they certainly lived somewhere
> within the range of the wildcat, must have been aware of the
animal's
> existence, and presumably had a name for it. Whether such a name is
> reconstructible is a different matter.
>
> Piotr
Before to arrive to PIE word for cat:
I posted some time ago, an mail regarding the split of domestic
dogs: do you know when this split happened?
More than 100,000 ago....around '135,000 years ago' (see below),
quite the same timeframe, with the split of domestic cats, isn't it?
"The coyote and wolf have a sequence divergence of 0.075 +/- 0.002
(17) and diverged about one million years ago, as estimated from the
fossil record (18). Consequently, because the sequence divergence
between the most different genotypes in clade I (the most diverse
group of dog sequences) is no more than 0.010, this implies that dogs
could have originated as much as 135,000 years ago (19). Although
such estimates may be inflated by unobserved multiple substitutions
at hypervariable sites (20), the sequence divergence within clade I
clearly implies an origin more ancient than the 14,000 years before
the present suggested by the archaeological record (21).
[Marius: ==> read again please the above paragraph, is very
important!]
Nevertheless, bones of wolves have been found in association with
those of hominids from as early as the middle Pleistocene, up to
400,000 years ago (1, 22). The ancient dates for domestication based
on the control region sequences cannot be explained by the retention
of ancestral wolf lineages, because clade I is exclusively
monophyletic with respect to dog sequences and thus the separation
between dogs and wolves has been long enough for coalescence to have
occurred. To explain the discrepancy in dates, we hypothesize that
early domestic dogs may not have been morphologically distinct from
their wild relatives. Conceivably, the change around 10,000 to 15,000
years ago from nomadic hunter-gatherer societies to more sedentary
agricultural population centers may have imposed new selective
regimes on dogs that resulted in marked phenotypic divergence from
wild wolves (23).
"
url:
http://www.idir.net/~wolf2dog/wayne1.htm
Now to come back on the split of domestic cats (I quote BBC because I
don't have access to Science):
"Ancestors of domestic cats are now thought to have broken away from
their wild relatives [...] as early as 130,000 years ago."
I put out 'and started living with humans' (not to say again that the
BBC article is different)
So to resume for you:
135,000 years for dog-split on one side, 130,000 years the cat
spplit: I would say 'on the same side'
This should make you think that only the domesticatication could be
the cause of such coincidence: I don't see any other link
between 'domestic dogs' and 'domestic cats' for such synchronic split
than the 'domestic' part of each one.
and this is only One argument 'for'...
Regarding PIE now:
If the Cat and the Dog were domesticated more than 100,000 ago the
PIE peoples Inherited the cat and dog words
so the Nord African origins of cattus or the agricultural customs in
relation with cat domestication are non-senses
Marius
P.S. : Maybe 'the new Darwin' (sorry Darwin only a joke) will come
to say that there are still wild dogs'
Yes there were some in Bucharest streets but the actual president
killed them when he was Maire of Bucharest...