The domestic cat as well as cat pheromones and types of cat-specific body language.
Since cats were cult animals in ancient Egypt, they were commonly believed to have been domesticated there, but there may have been instances of domestication as early as the Neolithic from around 9500 years ago .
A genetic study in 2007 concluded that domestic cats are descended from African wildcats c. 8000 BC, in the Near East. According to Scientific American, cats are the most popular pet in the world, and are now found almost every place where people live.
Nomenclature and etymology
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+Classification based on human interaction and Byzantine Greek, including Portuguese and Spanish gato, French chat, German Katze, Lithuanian katė and Old Church Slavonic kotka, among others. The ultimate source of the word is Afroasiatic, presumably from Late Egyptian čaute, the feminine of čaus "wildcat". The word was introduced, together with the domestic animal itself, to the Roman Republic by the 1st century BC.
An alternative word with cognates in many languages is English puss . Attested only from the 16th century, it may have been introduced from Dutch poes or from Low German puuskatte, related to Swedish kattepus, or Norwegian pus, pusekatt. Similar forms exist in Lithuanian puižė and Irish puisín. The etymology of this word is unknown, but it may have simply arisen from a sound used to attract a cat.
A group of cats is referred to as a "clowder" or a "glaring", a male cat is called a "tom" or "tomcat", an unaltered female is called a "queen", and a pre-pubescent juvenile is referred to as a "kitten". Although spayed females have no commonly used name, in some rare instances immature or spayed females are referred to as a "molly". The male progenitor of a cat, especially a pedigreed cat, is its "sire", and its female progenitor is its "dam". In Early Modern English, the word kitten was interchangeable with the now-obsolete word catling.
A pedigreed cat is one whose ancestry is recorded by a cat fancier organization. A purebred cat is one whose ancestry contains only individuals of the same breed. Many pedigreed and especially purebred cats are exhibited as show cats. Cats of unrecorded, mixed ancestry are referred to as domestic short-haired or domestic long-haired cats, by coat type, or commonly as random-bred, moggies, or mongrels or mutt-cats.
While the African wildcat is the ancestral subspecies from which domestic cats are descended, and wildcats and domestic cats can completely interbreed, there are several intermediate stages between domestic pet and pedigree cats on the one hand and those entirely wild animals on the other. The semi-feral cat is a mostly outdoor cat that is not owned by any one individual, but is generally friendly to people and may be fed by several households. Feral cats are associated with human habitation areas and may be fed by people or forage in rubbish, but are typically wary of human interaction. and include, in addition to the domestic cat, lions, tigers, cougars, and many others. Within this family, domestic cats are part of the genus Felis, which is a group of small cats containing approximately seven species . Members of the genus are found worldwide and include the jungle cat of southeast Asia, European wildcat, African wildcat, the Chinese mountain cat, and the Arabian sand cat, among others.
All the cats in this genus share a common ancestor that probably lived around 6-7 million years ago in Asia. The exact relationships within the Felidae are close but still uncertain, e.g. the Chinese mountain cat is sometimes classified as a subspecies of the wildcat, like the North African variety F. s. lybica. As domestic cats are little altered from wildcats, they can readily interbreed. This hybridization poses a danger to the genetic distinctiveness of wildcat populations, particularly in Scotland and Hungary, and possibly also the Iberian Peninsula.
The domestic cat was first classified as Felis catus by Carolus Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae in 1758. However, because of modern phylogenetics, domestic cats are now usually regarded as another subspecies of the wildcat, Felis silvestris. This has resulted in mixed usage of the terms, as the domestic cat can be called by its subspecies name, Felis silvestris catus. The most common name in use for the domestic cat remains F. catus, following a convention for domesticated animals of using the earliest synonym proposed.
Cats have either a mutualistic or commensal relationship with humans. However, in comparison to dogs, cats have not undergone major changes during the domestication process, as the form and behavior of the domestic cat are not radically different from those of wildcats, and domestic cats are perfectly capable of surviving in the wild. This limited evolution during domestication means that domestic cats tend to interbreed freely with wild relatives, However, several natural behaviors and characteristics of wildcats may have pre-adapted them for domestication as pets. they may also have an inborn tendency towards tameness. However, this has been criticized as implausible, because there may have been little reward for such an effort: cats generally do not carry out commands and, although they do eat rodents, other species such as ferrets or terriers may be better at controlling these pests. The alternative idea is that cats were simply tolerated by people and gradually diverged from their wild relatives through natural selection, as they adapted to hunting the vermin found around humans in towns and villages.
Genetics
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