Instant Genius - How cats became one of our most-loved domestic pets

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

From Lewis Carrol’s mysterious grinning Cheshire Cat and Jim Davis’s lazy, lasagne-loving comic strip tabby Garfield to the depictions of big cats found in palaeolithic cave art and the ancient Egyptian’s practice of worshipping cat-like deities, it’s clear we humans have had a long-standing fascination with felines. But how did this obsession with these charismatic animals begin? In this episode, we’re joined by Jerry D Moore, a professor of anthropology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, to talk about his latest book Cat Tales: A History – How We Learned to Live with Them… He tells us how ancient cultures feared and revered the big cats they shared their land with thanks to their prowess as apex predators, how human’s development of agriculture and the storage of grain gave wild cats a reliable hunting ground in which to catch rodents, and how the domestic house cats of today may have chosen to live with us and much as we chose to live with them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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From Lewis Carroll's mysterious, grinning Cheshire cat, and Jim Davis's lazy, lasagna-loving comic strip Tabby Garfield, to the depictions of big cats found in Paleolithic cave art, and the ancient Egyptians practice of worshipping cat-like deities, it's clear we humans have had a long-standing fascination with felines. But how did this obsession with these charismatic animals begin? In this episode, we're joined by Jerry D. Moore, a professor of anthropology at California State University, Dominguez Hills,

to talk about his latest book, Cat Tales are History, how we learned to live with them. He tells us our ancient cultures, feared and revered the big cats they shared their land with, thanks to their prowess as apex predators. How humans' development of agriculture and the storage of grain gave wildcats a reliable hunting ground in which to catch rodents, and how the domestic house cats of today may have chosen to live with us

as much as we chose to live with them. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for inviting me. So today we're talking about your latest book, Cat Tales, A History, How We Learned to Live With Them. So fascinating title. First, I'd like to sort of dig down into your background and how you got into studying cats. It's most people's dream job. At times it seemed more like a nightmare.

But I'm an archaeologist. And my professional research has been in both Peru and Mexico. and also here in California and the United States. And to some extent, none of that, or very little of that research, is directly relevant to the cat's book. Except insofar as that my approach to archaeology has always been an anthropology of the past. So little things tend to catch my eye and little questions that I often find lead to larger and larger and larger topics. And that's been true of all of my research, and including writing various scientific books, et cetera, while there was a cat in my office watching me do these things. And so I thought

about that and taking that kind of perspective about how little things that we encounter in our daily lives can often lead to much larger things. I started to wonder, how did this animal end up in my life, in my office, et cetera, and how is that experience both universal and distinct from the ways in which other people at other times in other cultures have interacted with different kinds of cats, not just the domestic tabby, but also. so fierce animals like tigers and jaguars and lions and things with that. And so, as is so often the case, a fairly straightforward and apparently simple question ended up leading to other sorts of issues. And that's one of the pleasures of archaeology. I venture if you said the word

cat to someone, most people will think of the domestic house cat. But of course there are many more species, tigers, lions, leopards, cheetahs, osolots, all sorts. But let's go right back in time then. And most people have heard of the saber-tooth cat. Right. But you talk

about something called the canopy cats. Those are the cats that live in the region of the Turkana basin known as canopy. So it's not a name of a cat, right? Yeah. But it is this really important.

important hominid locale that a number of people have worked at. I haven't worked at. I'm just reporting on that literature, in which we have a remarkable fossil record of early hominid evolution. And one of the things that comes out of not only the study of the hominid fossils, but of the fossils of other animals in that region, is just how felines cats of different species, were very much part of the environment of evolutionary adaptation, that we had to deal with them. We had to avoid them. We had to avoid being eaten by them, just so that we could evolve. And so I bring that up because it, A, it's significant for understanding humans, but also it's resonant with the ways that

in which we continue to live with large cats in various parts of the world today. So I write about the ways in which, for example, traditional pastoralists, the Maasai, think about it, interact with cats. And I want to make sure that everyone understands. I'm not doing that because I think that the Maasai are somehow, you know, frozen representatives of a deep human past. I'm doing that because they have this really fascinating and articulated interaction with the cats that surround them, in this case, lions. And similarly with other groups like the traditional herders to gear in India who deal with tigers.

And one of the things that comes out from these really disparate cases is just this sense of resists. and this alert attention to cats as actors, not just passive pets, but as active agents in the environments in which we occupy. And I think that that's a pretty classic insight into the ways in which humans and cats of different species have interacted, been required to interact. for thousands and thousands of years. Yeah, so you also talk about something called cave lions. And so that's something I've never heard about.

Can you sort of give us a bit of detail on that, please? Yes, I mean, there are varieties of different large cats that have lived in caves at different times, okay? But one of the places that we see them most elegantly portrayed is in Paleolithic cave art. And the thing that's interesting about the animals that tend to show up in the Paleolithic cave art is that it's not just a beastie area. It's not just folks who are drawing pictures of all the animals that they encounter in their lives.

For example, there's this classic archaeological study that showed, you know, that a large percentage of the diet was actually river muscles, you know, clams and things like that. none of which appear on the walls of these caves. And so there's a selection process there that implies an observant interaction with those animals. And the thing that really caught my eye when I was doing the research for this book is I came across the concept that comes out of environmental studies of charismatic cats and charismatic animals. And there's been massive studies.

by psychologists, by advertisers. So, for example, World Wildlife Fund does not put like a tapeworm on as its icon or something like that, right? They select among, from these charismatic animals that psychologists and other researchers have also established. And I think it's out of the top 10, it's something like four or five of those animals are cats, large cats. And the majority of the most charismatic animals also show up in Paleolithic cave art, which I think is absolutely fascinating. And I'm not suggesting that they show up for exactly the same reasons as we show them in advertising for the most recent Disney cartoon. But the idea that there would be that continuity between distant human ancestors and us and ancient cats and the animal that's sitting in my office, that really fascinated me. Personally, I'm very interested in ancient Egypt. And you talk about this in a lot of detail in the book about cats, how they actually mummified the cats to be buried with them. You know, what can we determine about that?

You know, that's an enormous topic, okay? One of the things that just, you know, set me back in the course of doing the research is I came across a source that stated that mummies were the most commonly made artifact in ancient Egypt. To think that mummies would be more numerous than cooking pots or something like, that that you would think of as being part of the day-to-day that they would be. And the other part of it is that some of the earliest mummies are enormous. I mean, for example, some of the earliest mummies are hippopotamai. And so it's not just cats, but all sorts of animals and by the tens of thousands of them. So that's part of the context. Then what happens is that you,

have an emphasis on feline deities like Bibatas and others, and they become really the object of veneration, and mummified cats become part of one of the many objects that are given in honor of that deity. So can we say, or do we even know, if they were made of a sort of a totem of protection or they want to take their pets, for one of a better word, into what they call the field of reeds. Yes, I'm not sure about that because I can't, you know, for example, I'm not an Egyptologist and I didn't go and look at the way in which cats might be part of commoners burials. Because frankly, you know, by the time I looked at. at some of these enormous cemeteries or these chambers at places like Sakhra and others,

it was just an overwhelming amount of information. But I do think, and there are other people who can speak to that issue better than I could, actually. But there's certainly an observant fascination with cats. And it lasts for centuries and results in some of these enormous cat cemeteries and other chambers like at Sakara and others that have all sorts of mummified animals in them. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

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It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio, and trocal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, name and focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in hi-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt,

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blush seem pretty straightforward, and we discovered these really unanticipated complexities to them. And cat domestication falls into that category. It's long been recognized that cats play an important role in keeping down mice and other kinds of vermin that would infest granaries and food supplies and things of that. All right. That's long been known. What's interesting, though, is that there are all sorts of places in the world.

For example, in the American Southwest, in Mexico, Mesoamerica, the Andes that had stored foods. They had grains. They had such corn and things of that sort. and also had a relatively small wild cat species that one would think would be a perfect candidate for domestication. And you realize that small cats like that, wild cats, exist on every continent with the exception of Australia and Antarctica. And yet all of our domestic cats, apparently, are derived from one genus, Phyllis Libica Sylvestis, that's found in North Africa and the Near East. And one of the things that has just been, I think, just the article I am thinking about,

I think was published within the last year, argues that it's not just the appearance of grain and these cats that lead to this unexpected interactions, but it's actually the westward migration of what becomes the house mouse, musculus, which moves west from the Himalayas across the Near East, North Africa, and Europe. And that's the aspect of the adaptation that brings those cats indoors. And so you can look at that in various archaeological sites that I talk about, for example, in Turkey and other places in the Near East that have been excavated carefully, and you can actually see this really complex set of interactions that unfolds over centuries.

And so what on the surface seems to be a relatively straightforward thing, people stored food, mice got the food, the cats came in, turns out to be much more complex than we thought. So one thing that I found quite interesting and quite fun is that, you know, say other domestic animals, horses, for example, dogs, we've kind of, as humans, brought them in ourselves. But in this sort of theory, the cats just came in because that was good for them and it was good for us too. You know, they made the decision sort of. Yeah. Throughout researching this book, the question recurrently popped into my head,

who domesticated whom? And I think if you're a cat owner, that's a question that resonates with your daily experience. It is very fascinating because our domestic house cats, obviously they're very solitary. Some cats do live in, like lions live in prides. But ours, like these cats, are very solitary. and yet they still keep coming back. Right. And there have actually been some really interesting studies,

and I don't have the sources on the top of my head right now, but I talk about them in the book, where folks have done studies of basically cat packs. So the domesticated cats that are not being actively served as pets, but they may be living on the outskirts of a farm or something like that. and some of that study, one of the things that points out is how critical the density of the food supply and the form of rodents and things like that is for doing that. So, again, it's one of those situations that it's remarkable that it ever occurred in the first place. Yeah, it's kind of like mutually beneficial.

Yes. The cat moved in for food to the rodents, and we didn't want them eating that grain. That's fascinating. And of course then, as human beings become more and more adept at ocean sailing, cats are very much on board. And one of the most remarkable stories that I came across in the course of doing the research was this story about how on Noah's Ark, the animals, this is, I think, a third century AD account. I could be wrong about that. But anyway, the legend has it that Noah has dutifully brought two of each kind of animal onto the ark, but the mice have gone crazy.

And they're eating up all the food. And the animals, the rest of the animals come together. And they say to Noah, you've got to kill the mice because we're starving to death, because they're eating up all the food. And Noah says, well, I can't do that because that would violate God's command for me to take two of each kind of. animal, put them on the ark, and preserve them. And as he's talking, Noah is stroking the muzzle of the lion who sneezes. And as the snot hits the deck, cats are miraculously created, and they keep the mice population under control, which is an amazing story. So let's go back a little bit, and then you talk a lot about the sort of, I don't know what to call it, the cat culture in Cyprus. I thought this was

really interesting. Can you explain that for us? Yeah. One of the things to set the frame for that is to remember that Cyprus was always separate from Eurasia during the time that humans moved in. And so the human population of it, the human settlement of it, especially in the Neolithic by farmers was by ship. And plants and animals, most of which originated in the Near East, were imported on ship to Cyprus. And that includes wheat and sheep and goats and dogs, but it also includes cats. And so the thing that was interesting about that is that in one of the excavations, and I can't remember the name of the site off the top of my head right now, they found all sorts of bones in a large pit,

kind of a communal grave pit. But separate from that was the burial of a young man, I think in his early 20s, and what seems to be his cat buried next to him. And the cat had the small necklace of shells around its neck. And it seems pretty reasonable to interpret that as not only being distinct from the ways in which other animals are being treated at that site, which is one point, but to argue that there might have been, or there's probably a personal connection between that young man and that animal, seems a pretty good piece of archaeological inference.

So the reason I ask that question is because when did cats start becoming pets and companions from being just useful things to have around the home? That's a hard question to answer because, I mean, it almost requires the kind of archaeological evidence that we have from Cyprus that we were just talking about. So I don't really know the answer to that. and we know that by certainly by oh i would say just off the top of my head by three to two thousand bc or so that's probably the situation but again it's not universal there are animals that are buried there are various felines that are buried intentionally with people for example in mesoamerica

that are clearly not pets they are sacrifices and things like that so The evidence for that kind of, that endearing treatment of the animals goes beyond just putting them in a pit. And that can occur at different times at different places. So, sort of, I've read the book myself, there's an awful lot of information in it. Is there anything that you, when you were researching this, thought, oh, I really wish I could figure that out, but we can't? Yeah, it would be this. What do they think of us? And I can't figure. out a way to figure that part out.

It's clear that whether we're talking about, you know, Tabby in my living room or P-22, the mountain lion that became this icon of Los Angeles, it's clear that something's going on behind those eyes. And I don't really know what that is. that would be what I would say is what do they think of us. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus.

That was Jerry D. Moore. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, Cat Tales a History, How We Learned to Live with them. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person,

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