The Pliocene Pussy Cat Theory
by Lorenzo L. Love
Yreka, California
illustrations by Peaco Todd
It has often been said that the dog was the first animal domesticated by
humans. The date of this has long been placed at 14,000 to 20,000 years
before present. Recent analysis of mitochondrial DNA of dogs, wolves, and
other canines show that dogs had actually split off from wolves 135,000
years ago. I propose that not only have paleontologists been mistaken about
the date of the domestication of dogs, dogs were not even the first animals
to be domesticated. This place of honor belongs to the ancestors of the
common house cat, Felis catus.
The cat was the first animal to be domesticated, more than 4 million years
ago, long before the genus Homo evolved. And in fact it was the cat, or
rather the loss of cats, that molded and shaped the evolution of Homo. (If
"domestication" doesn’t sit well with you when applied to
the relationship between a prehuman primate and a cat, think of it as a
quasi-symbiotic relationship.)
There are many unexplained matters in the early history of hominines. How
could the australopithecines survive in Pliocene Africa? No tools for hunting,
too small and weak to complete with other scavengers, teeth (in the gracile
form) unadapted for plant eating, they seem to have been unable to even
feed themselves. And the slow and small australopithecines would have been
easy prey for the first large carnivore to come along. Where did they spend
the night? In spite of their disadvantages, australopithecines managed to
survive almost unchanged for 2 million years. How? And why did these survivors
suddenly evolve into a new genus, Homo, just then the large carnivores were
dying out? The answer to all these questions: the Pliocene Pussy Cat.
There are five sections to the Pliocene Pussy Cat Theory (PPCT). Subsistence,
defense, shelter, extinction and evolution. But first some background.
Some Background
Modern domestic cats are descendants of the African wild cat, a species which hominines have always co-existed with. Compare this with the dog.
Modern dogs are descendants of the European Gray Wolf, a species that early
hominines had no contact with. This by itself means that it is more likely
that cats were domesticated first.
There are several cases of modern apes adopting cats as pets. One classic
example that we will examine later is that of Koko the gorilla. Cases of
apes adopting any other species are far rarer. The recent case in Osaka,
Japan of a wild macaque monkey stealing a kitten shows that this is not
limited to captive primates
Stray cats are far more likely to move into a human’s home, and by
doing so to become self domesticated, than any other species.
A cat, unlike any other domestic animal, will hunt on its own and then bring
its prey back to its home and drop it in its master’s lap.
Few feline fossils have been found at australopithecine living sites. However,
sick cats tend to go off and die by themselves. Any fossils found would
be mistaken for wild cats. Even today, it is nearly impossible to tell a
domestic cat’s skeleton from that of an African Wild Cat.
We do know that cats and primates were in close association in the past,
because cats are known to have acquired a primate virogene some 5 to 10
million years ago.
Subsistence; or What the Cat Dragged In
How did the australopithecines find food given that they had no natural
adaptations for hunting, no tools and (in the case of the gracile form)
teeth unadapted for a vegetarian diet? Their cats fed them. Anyone who has
owned modern cats knows that there is nothing cats love more than to bring
home presents of food for their masters.
It was based on the numbers of mice, birds, lizards, toads, frogs and large
insects that my cats bring me that I first developed my theory regarding
the early (4 million years before present) domestication of the ancestors
of the African wild cat.
Australopithecines massed from 29 to 45 kilograms. They would have required
about 1000 to 2000 calories per day. A nice juicy mouse has between 200
and 400 calories. So at worse case, an australopithecine would need 10 mice
or their equivalent each day. As a cat, in a mouse (or prey equivalent)
rich environment, can easily catch far more than they can eat, it would
not take many cats to support an australopithecine. Five cats per hominine,
each bringing in an average of two extra mice (or prey equivalent) each
day, together with what little the hominine could find for itself, would
easily support an australopithecine. Based on the above points, it seems
clear that the best way for australopithecines to have fed themselves was
not by hunting, not by scavenging carnivore kills, not by gathering plant
food, but by having their pet cats bring them small game.
Defense; or Cat Throwing as a Martial Art
Question: How did the early hominines protect themselves from the many
large predators with which they coexisted, without any weapons?
Answer: They did have a weapon. The cat.
Imagine that you have an angry tomcat thrown at your face. That would discourage
even a lion or a hyena, at least long enough for the thrower to make his
escape. Hard on the cat, but they breed replacements quickly. Male cats
would be the primary weapon. The australopithecine may not have been able
to conceptualize that they were preserving females for future breeding,
however it doesn’t take much thought to know that the slightly larger
tomcats would make a better weapon.
Two million years of being carried around as a defensive weapon may account
for the modern cat’s desire to be held. This carrying of cats, while
almost certainly not the cause of bipedalism in Homo, would certainly have
reinforced the use of a bipedal posture.
I’m surprised that people don’t still carry cats as an anti-mugging
defense. It works better than mace.
Experimental Proof
After obtaining a number of cats and human volunteers, perform the following
steps:
1. Have volunteer attack you.
2. Throw cat at head of attacker.
3. Call ambulance for attacker.
4. Repeat steps 1 through 3 until volunteers decline to attack.
As you will see, cats can be very effective in both fighting off an attack
and in preventing future attacks.
Shelter; or The Static Cling Theory
At night, the African savanna can be a savage and dangerous place even
today.
During the time of our australopithecine ancestors it was far more dangerous
than it is now. It is hard to see how a small and defenseless animal like
an australopithecine could survive it on the ground. It has often been said
that an australopithecine, with its feet and legs well adapted to bipedalism,
could not climb trees very well, and would have a very hard time spending
an entire night in a tree hanging on with just its hands. Females with young
would have been especially vulnerable.
Other explanations of how they spent the night (such as brush fences) have
their own problems. But what if they had "help" to stay in the
trees?
I have already demonstrated how australopithecines could have met their
food needs by use of the cat and how they could have used cats for defense.
Now I will show how they could have used cats for night time shelter.
As anyone who has ever petted a cat during dry weather (weather like that
on the African savanna) knows, cat fur has the potential for producing enormous
amounts of static electricity. Rub a child’s balloon on a cat and it
will stick to the ceiling, sometimes for days. I propose that australopithecines
used this static-producing property of cats to help them spend the nights
safely in the trees, out of the reach of the many large carnivores that
roamed the African savanna. If an australopithecine rubbed itself briskly
with one or more cats, it might be able to build up a large enough electro-static
charge for it to stick to the branches of the tree just as the balloon sticks
to the ceiling.
It’s possible the australopithecines had to wait for the coming of
the morning dew to discharge the static charge and allow them to drop to
the ground. More likely they discharged themselves by urinating. A stream
of urine is a good conductor. You can test this by peeing on an electric
fence. This history may explain why humans have such a disproportional large
penis, the largest penis of any primate. The males may have used the better
aim their long penis gave them to "shoot down" the females and
young.
The australopithecines may not have needed to rub the cats against their
bodies themselves; the cats would have done it automatically. A few hundred
generations of selective breeding of cats could easily have produced this
behavior; this is a wink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Millions of years
later, modern cats still show vestiges of this behavior.
Experimental Proof
I attempted to duplicate the australopithecine’s static cling on a
test subject (myself), however at over 100 kilograms, the test subject was
far heavier than an australopithecine, and not quite as hairy as the australopithecines
are generally believed to have been. Also, only two cats were available
for the experiment, and they were not at all cooperative. For these reasons
the experiment failed. There was a weight decrease of several tens of grams,
but as this was due to blood loss, I do not consider it pertinent to the
experiment. However, valuable data was gathered on the use of cats as weapons,
so the experiment was not a total loss.
Perhaps somebody else would like to try the experiment. If anyone out there
has access to a young chimpanzee of a weight of 45 kilograms or less and
a large number of cats, just rub the chimp briskly with the cats until the
chimp sticks to the ceiling. In order to get it back down, do what an australopithecine
would do and piss on it. Just make sure the chimp does not have a full bladder
during the test or you may find the experiment is over before it starts.
Extinction; or Killer Kitties
It is curious that during the time of the australopithecines, many species
of very large and very dangerous carnivores became extinct. The hominines
could not have caused this directly, so it must have been done by their
cats.
But how could a little pussy cat kill a giant hyena or a sabertooth lion?
I have been giving this question a lot of thought and I have come up with
a scenario in which the Pliocene pussy cats could cause the extinction of
large carnivores. It came to me in a Darwinian flash of inspiration while
thinking of Farley Mowat’s classic book Never Cry Wolf.
Mowat tells about the wolves which everyone had believed lived solely on
big game prey. He found that the wolves really lived on mice for most of
the year.
Let us propose that the large African carnivores lived in a similar manner.
They would feed heavily on large prey animals at certain times of the year,
i.e. during grazing animal migration, but for most of the year they would
feed exclusively on mice or other rodents. When the Pliocene pussy cat population
boomed due to their association with hominids, they simply out competed
the larger carnivores by eating all of the mice. Most of the large carnivores
died out, leaving only those few species present today who did not feed
on rodents.
We see a similar situation today in Australia and New Zealand where imported
Holocene pussy cats are in the process of causing mass extinction of the
native animals. We need a study of five million year old hyena scats. I
am confidence that they have a lot of rodent bones and hair in them compared
to modern hyena scats.
Evolution; or The Making of Mankind
Australopithecines remained more or less unchanged for 2 million years.
This shows that they were very well adapted to their environment. So what
forced their evolution into Homo?
Australopithecines were successful only because of their association with
cats. The loss of the use of cats would have forced australopithecines as
a species to change or die. Cats also remained unchanged during this period
which shows that they too were well adapted.
I believe that cats were so successful due to their association with australopithecines
that their population increased beyond the environment’s carrying capability.
The end of the Pliocene is marked by the Malthusian collapse of the cat
population.
This may have been due to disease caused by overcrowding, but there is
evidence that it was due to overhunting. Henry Wesselman has done research
that shows that the micro-mammal fauna, rodents and other small mammals,
under went a sudden population collapse and shift in species types. Cats
ate themselves out of business.
No longer able to obtain food, shelter or protection from cats, most australopithecines
died out. Only the bigger and the smartest managed to survive. Some entire
species of cat using australopithecines were unable to adapt, and so Australopithecus
africanus quickly went extinct. The plant eating robust australopithicenes
were not as dependent on cats as the graciles, and so were able to hold
on longer, but in the end, A. robustus and A. boisei met their doom. Only
a small group of gracile australopithecines in East Africa were able to
adapt and change. The chaotic morphologies of Homo rudolfensis, H. habilis,
H. microcranous, H. ergaster and other hominines of this period so odd that
they can not be assigned to a species show a creature under severe evolutionary
pressure.
Eventfully, out of this transitional period, Homo erectus emerged, a species
fully adapted to life without cats. With its larger size, stone weapons
and most of all fire, H. erectus could have provided for their own food
and defense; and would have no need to sleep in trees. Indeed, its large
size would no doubt have prevented erectus from taking advantage of static
cling. H. erectus had no need for cats.
A Living Model for a Cat Using Hominid
One way to find out how primates get along with cats is to ask one. Koko,
the famous sign language using gorilla, has long had pet cats. Many films
of Koko show her playing with her pet kitten with a great deal of love and
tenderness. Koko often talks about her first cat, All Ball, which was killed
by a car years ago. Koko’s "Mom" and translator, Dr. Francine
"Penny" Patterson reports that Koko still mourns for this long
dead cat. I am sure that if Koko’s present cat is allowed to roam free,
it will be bringing home mice and other prey, just as almost all free roaming
house cats do. As a gorilla has about the same mental capability as an australopithecine,
Koko and her kitten can serve as a model for the early domestication of
the ancestors of the modern cat by members of genus Australopithecus and/or
Ardipithecus over 4 million years ago.
No other hominine evolutionary theory can present a living model. There
is no ape living in the savanna. There is no ape living in an aquatic environment.
But there is an ape living with a cat. As a gorilla, Koko would not think
of eating a mouse that her cat brought her, but there is little doubt that
human ancestors were not so choosy. As famed writer Farley Mowat once proved
while on a field trip as a student biologist, even modern humans can survive
quite well on a diet of nothing but mice.
Two questions remain.
How Did it All Start?
The Aquatic Ape Theory (AAT) states that the very early hominines had a
semi-aquatic phase in which they lived in a littoral area and fed largely
on fish and shellfish. PPCT is fully compatible with AAT. We all know that
cats love fish. It could be that during our semi-aquatic phase, when we
were eating a lot of fish, cats first came into contact with human ancestors,
by stealing leftover fish heads. A bond was formed between feline and hominine,
with the hominine supplying most of the food at first, and then after moving
out into the savanna, cats supplying most of the food.
What Did the Cats Get Out of It?
Basically the same thing they get out of humans today, minus the canned
cat food. Protection for their kittens would have been the most important
thing, but the cats would have also appreciated a warm body to curl up next
to at night, and something that only a hominine can provide, fingers to
scratch that spot on the neck that can’t be gotten to any other way.
As any cat owner will tell you, the bond between cat and human is a deep
one that goes beyond physical needs.
Timeline
I propose the following timeline:
4.4 million years ago -- Ardipithecus ramidus, a non-cat using woodland
biped makes first contact with Felis attica, the ancestor of all modern
small cats, which was about the same size as a modern house cat.
4.2 to 3.9 million years ago -- Australopithecus anamensis, a transitional
species, learns to make full use of the cat which enabled its move onto
the savanna.
3.9 to 2.4 million years ago -- Australopithecus afarensis is fully
adapted to life on the savanna using cats for subsistence, defense and shelter.
Those Felis atticas in association with hominines evolve into Felis lunensis.
Wild Felis atticas evolve into various species of small wild cats.
2.4 to 1.8 million years ago -- Homo habilis, another transitional
species, loses the use of cats and is forced to find other means of support.
During this period, other cat using hominines such a A. africanus and the
robust australopithecines failed to make the transition to non-cat life
and went extinct. This population crash of Felis lunensis forces the evolution
of Felis silvestris, the modern African Wild Cat, as the surviving cats
return to the wild.
1.8 million years ago -- Homo erectus is now fully adapted to life
without cats. Felis silvestris is fully adapted to life without hominines.
4000 years ago -- Homo sapiens re-domesticate the cat. Felis silvestris
evolves into Felis catus, the modern domestic cat.
I am looking forward to having my Pliocene Pussy Cat Theory receiving the same respect and consideration that the Aquatic Ape Theory has received.
© Copyright 2001 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)
This HotAIR feature first appeared in VOLUME
7-ISSUE 5 of the print magazine. For a complete list of web site featured
articles, see What's New.