Jonathan B. Losos
speaker
49 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Jonathan B. Losos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
It's a fascinating story. A key development in the interaction of people and cats was the development of kitty litter, which was only invented in the 1940s. Before that time, the possibility of having a cat that just lived indoor all the time was very difficult. All this today on Something You Should Know.
Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, everyone knows what a cat is just by looking at one. And it turns out that the first cat that was discovered in the fossil record, the ancestor of all cats, as far as we can tell, evolved about 30 million years ago. And it pretty much looked like a cat.
Its legs were a little bit shorter than most cats, but if you saw one walking down the street, you would say, hey, that's a cat. And so, I mean, I could give you the technical aspects of the anatomy that define members of the Thelidae, the cat family, but essentially a cat is a cat and no one's going to confuse one with something else.
And that's been true throughout the evolutionary history of this group. There have been variations, bigger and smaller, spots on the coat and so on. Of course, there were the saber-toothed cats, but essentially they've all been cats.
Well, today there are 42 living species, and I think people might be surprised to hear that, that there are so many. Everyone knows the big cats. Those are the celebrities of the cat world, the lions, the tigers, the cheetahs, and so on. They have their own week on National Geographic, and everyone knows them.
The little cats, though, which I'm defining as cats that weigh less than 50 pounds, are much more common. And I like to ask people, can you name species of cats less than 50 pounds? And the two that people usually get right away are the ocelot and the bobcat. But after that, people often are stumped. But there's all kinds of obscure cats that no one has heard of.
The tigrina, the ancilla, the marbled cat, the Bornean bay cat, the rusty footed cat.
Well, that's a great question, and scientists have been studying that for quite some time now. And the consensus, it's pretty clear at this point that the domestic cat, which is what we call the species around us, technically Felis caddis, the domestic cat evolved from the African wildcat. This is a species that is found throughout Africa and into the Arabian Peninsula and Western Asia.
And they actually look... Very much alike. I like to say that if you saw an African wildcat in your backyard, your response would not be, what's an African wildcat doing in New Jersey? But it would be, what a beautiful cat. I've never seen one quite like that. So they are very similar in their anatomy and it turns out in their DNA as well.
But it's very clear that that was the ancestor of the domestic cat and that domestication probably occurred somewhere in the area called the Fertile Crescent that stretches from Turkey, Syria, Israel through to Egypt and where civilization really got its start, where people first settled down and lived in villages and agriculture developed.
Well, the probable path, and this is actually very hard to study actually, but what seems very likely is that when people started living in villages and growing crops and agriculture really took off, well, as you know, when farmers grow crops, there's the good season and the bad season.
So you grow as much food as you can when the seasons are right, and then you store the food for the rest of the year in granaries or whatever. Well, when that happens, the logical, obviously what happens next is that rodents are attracted. Mice and rats see this bounty of food in this building that they can easily go through the walls. And so they start, the rodent population explodes.
Well, in turn, African wildcats are no dummies, and they realize there's all these choice yummy rodents right there, and so they are attracted to live around the villages. But the important thing to keep in mind here is that animals have personalities. This has been a very vibrant area of research in the last few years. And by personalities, I mean behavioral tendencies.
Some cats behave differently than others just due to their predispositions, just like people. And so to anthropomorphize, there might be some cats that are bold and curious and others that are scaredy cats. They're timid and afraid. So the ones that are bolder, using the term loosely, may have been willing to go around villages to be near people to take advantage of the rodents.
And those would be the ones that benefited, that they would get lots of food to eat, and so they would have lots of kittens. And as a result, the genetic mutations that are responsible for those behaviors would become more common in the population. And so it would be a phenomenon that the cats that are willing to hang around people do better.
and in turn people may have seen the benefit of these cats so maybe they started putting out a little food for them to to encourage them to be around or maybe they gave them shelter a warm a warm spot to sleep when uh at night or day when they were sleeping and so this back and forth where the cats that were willing to do this benefited and then people encouraged it even more and eventually the cats were hanging around the village all the time and maybe people started petting them
Let me answer that in a couple of ways. First is that the most likely scenario for dog domestication is pretty similar, that the curious or boldest dog started hanging around people, and in this case, probably eating the scraps and the trash and so on. But it probably occurred in a very similar sort of scenario But it happened a lot earlier.
The archaeological record suggests that dogs may have been domesticated 15,000 years ago or even earlier. The genetic data suggests it might have been closer to 30,000 years. So dogs have been domesticated longer than cats have. And so maybe the difference is just due to time. But there's another possibility, and that is that dogs are pack animals.
And so somewhere during the domestication process, humans were able to substitute ourselves as the alpha dogs, if you will. That's a gross characterization. And so we've been able to take over the lead, and dogs have just adapted their pack living behaviors and directed them towards us. And so they may have been predisposed to become much more intimately involved with people than cats were.
So that may explain the difference. On the other hand, there is this idea that cats are aloof loners, and that is not entirely true. It turns out that in places where cats occur at high densities, they actually are very social with each other, very amiable to each other.
Showing 1–20 of 49 · page 1 of 3
Next →