A blue Abyssinian cat. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Cats and humans have shared homes for at least 9,000 years, but we still know very little about how cats were tamed (domesticated). Researchers have found some clues by analysing cat DNA, however. They found that offering food as a reward was key.

DNA is the instructions for how living things grow.  Scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (USA) looked at differences in DNA between tame cats and wild cats. They looked at the DNA of a female Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon. They picked her because they had information about her parents, grandparents, greatparents and so on, going back several generations.

The scientists found changes in the domestic cat’s genes that other studies have shown are involved in behaviors such as memory, fear and reward-seeking. They think that these behaviours — particularly seeking a reward — are important for domestication.

“Humans most likely welcomed cats because they controlled rodents that consumed their grain harvests,” explains Wes Warren. “We hypothesized that humans would offer cats food as a reward to stick around.” A hypothesis is an idea that the scientist wants to test by doing some experiments.

This meant that certain cats that would normally live alone in the wild would want to stay around humans. Humans chose to keep cats that were more docile and over time, by choosing more docile cats, cats that took after their docile parents would have prospered. In this way, over generations, cats became more tame.