The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Origins of domestic dogs and cats

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Monday, Jul 11, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Origins of domestic dogs and cats

Justine Hankins

ACCORDING TO Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, canine domestication came about when Woman struck up a deal with Wild Dog: "Help my Man to hunt through the day and guard this Cave at night, and I will give you as many roast bones as you need." And so began a mutually beneficial partnership. Kipling may well have been spot on, but the precise terms and conditions of the original contract will never be known.

We do know that dogs were the first species to be domesticated. Fragments of Palaeolithic pooches dating back some 12,000 years have been found in the Middle East — that's several thousand years before sheep and goats were first herded into flocks.

But what were these early dogs for? Food is one possibility. A heap of chopped bones from Romanian Mesolithic mutts offers evidence of an ancient taste for canine kebab. One of the earliest dog finds in Europe is a skeleton from around 7000BC uncovered at Star Carr, a Mesolithic settlement in Yorkshire, northern England. The bones are well chewed — whether by human or animal is unclear. But it's unlikely that any of our ancestors kept dogs primarily for food. They were no doubt tolerated because they were the only intruder alarms on the market.

Ritual significance?

Dog remains found in human burial sites suggest they also had ritual significance. One striking example that backs up this idea was found in Israel, where an excavation of a 12,000-year-old tomb revealed the skeleton of an elderly human whose hand is resting on the bones of a puppy. It's possible that dogs were sacrificed to accompany humans into the next world — which certainly seems to have been the fate of some of the earliest moggies.

Cats were domesticated much later than dogs and livestock animals. There have been few significant feline finds from before 1500BC, when New Kingdom Egyptians went cat crazy. They were fanatical about felines and hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of cats were given ritual burials. When a pet cat died, it was mummified and mourned. But many cat mummies show signs of having suffered a violent death, usually a broken neck, which does suggest that sacrifices were also common.

Thousands of cat mummies were found in a cemetery on the site of a temple dedicated to Pakhet, the lion-headed goddess of the Middle Nile who was the patron of inner strength, especially for women.

Cat heritage destroyed

Unfortunately, a lot of cat heritage was destroyed in the 19th century. A single cat skull in the British Museum is all that remains of one particular consignment of mummified cats — unbelievably, all 19 tonnes were shipped from Egypt to the U.K. to be turned into fertilizer. In recent years, further excavations at Pakhet's temple have uncovered more cat burial grounds, which may yet yield intriguing information about the pussycat's roots.

Thanks to this mountain of kitty bone, Egyptians are generally credited with having domesticated the cat. But the tame tom may well be older than the pyramids. It's almost impossible to distinguish a wild cat from its tame cousin just by looking at a skeleton.

No wonder, then, that zoo archaeologists got very excited when a cat jawbone from 6000BC was discovered at a Neolithic site in Cyprus. It's unlikely to have belonged to a wild animal, because there's no fossil evidence of wild cats on the island. The hypothesis is that the cat was deliberately taken to Cyprus by humans, possibly as a means of vermin control. Given that a wild cat would be unlikely to hang around human settlements diligently to mop up the mice, we can surmise that domestic cats existed long before fancy Egyptian feline funerals.

But, let's face it, we just don't know when cats became tame, so we may as well stick to Kipling: The Cat That Walked By Himself will not make a bargain with his freedom.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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