The Story of Cats

There are hundreds of millions of pet cats in the world, curled up on sofas and windowsills. But your cat is a hunter with a very long story — one that starts tens of millions of years before there were any people to feed it. Let’s follow that story from the age of the dinosaurs all the way to the cat food aisle.

Where does a cat fit in the animal family tree?

Scientists sort living things into groups inside bigger groups, a bit like nested boxes. A house cat’s boxes look like this:

• It’s an animal, and more specifically a mammal — warm-blooded, furry, and it feeds its babies milk.
• Among mammals it’s a carnivore — part of the meat-eating group.
• Within the carnivores it belongs to the cat family, called Felidae — the group that includes lions, tigers, leopards, and small wild cats.
• Its exact species is Felis catus — the domestic cat.

Deep time: cats are older than you think

“Deep time” means the enormous stretches of time that shaped life on Earth — millions of years, not thousands. To feel how the cat’s story fits against other famous events, walk through this timeline. It uses a log scale, which is a clever trick: instead of every step being the same number of years, every big step is 10 times older. That’s the only way to fit “66 million years ago” and “last week” on the same line.

Click the dots, or use the Older / Newer buttons, to move through time.

The wild cat behind your cat

Every domestic cat on Earth is descended from the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), a sandy-coloured wild cat still living in Africa and the Middle East today. It looks a lot like a slightly leggy tabby. That’s the key point: cats were not built from scratch by humans. We started with a wild animal that was already a superb mouse-hunter.

How cats got domesticated (they mostly did it themselves)

Domestication means a wild animal changing, over many generations, to live alongside people. For most animals — cows, sheep, dogs — humans did the choosing, breeding the ones they wanted. Cats are the famous exception.

Here’s what most likely happened:

1. About 12,000 years ago, people in the Fertile Crescent started farming and storing grain in one place.
2. Stored grain attracted mice and rats — free food for a wildcat.
3. Wildcats moved in to hunt the rodents. The ones that were calm around people got the most food and did best.
4. Those calmer cats had kittens that were also calm, and over thousands of years the village cats slowly became tamer and friendlier.

Scientists call this the commensal pathway — “commensal” means “sharing a table.” The cats came for the mice, stayed for the easy life, and tamed themselves. Humans mostly just… let them.

What makes a cat a cat?

A few things all cats — wild or tame — have in common:

• Obligate carnivores. Cats must eat meat. Their bodies can’t make enough of certain nutrients (like taurine, needed for the heart and eyes), so they have to get them from animal food. A cat can’t be healthy on a plant-only diet.
• Built to hunt. Excellent night vision, hearing that reaches far higher pitches than ours, and stiff whiskers that sense the width of a gap in the dark.
• Retractable claws. Cats can pull their claws in to stay quiet and keep them sharp, then flick them out to grab prey.
• Usually loners — but flexible. Most wild cats live and hunt alone. Domestic cats are unusual: they can live in groups (and with us), which is a big part of why they fit into human homes.

Key words

Check yourself

From the death of the dinosaurs to the purring ball of fur on your lap — that’s tens of millions of years of evolution, and about ten thousand years of cats deciding that living with us was a pretty good deal.