期刊名称：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
印刷版ISSN：0027-8424
电子版ISSN：1091-6490
出版年度：2020
卷号：117
期号：31
页码：18154-18156
DOI：10.1073/pnas.2011993117
出版社：The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
摘要：Cats have had diverse relationships with humans, ranging from rodent control, to household pets, to cultural icons. The presence of rodents in grain stores in Neolithic farming settlements is widely thought to have led to the domestication of cats (1⇓–3). Felid bones are rare in archaeological sites, however, and processes of cat domestication and dispersal are not well understood. A study by Krajcarz et al. (4) in PNAS reports on the initial spread of Near Eastern cats ( Felis silvestris lybica/Felis catus ), from southwest Asia into Europe ∼6,200 to 4,300 ya. Their unique data include Neolithic skeletal material from several Near Eastern cats found outside human settlements, and their analysis demonstrates that cats associated with early farmers in synanthropic or commensal relationships (5), hunting in agricultural landscapes. By documenting ancient ecological relationships in humanly modified landscapes, this isotopic research contributes to understanding landscape scale human niche construction (6, 7) and to future directions in domestication research (8⇓–10). The earliest cats discovered to date were buried in early agricultural settlements, and scholars have proposed commensal and mutualistic domestication pathways for their domestication (1⇓–3). Direct archaeological evidence for a commensal relationship between millet farmers and small felids feeding within the human food web was documented at Quanhucan in China (Fig. 1) (∼5,560 to 5,280 ya) (11), where leopard cats ( Prionailurus bengalensis ) (12) hunted rodents in a farming village ecology and may have even been fed. However, this relationship did not lead to full domestication (12).
