Tag Archives: cats

The origins of cats

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One of the cat skeletons excavated from a site in Egypt.

One of the cat skeletons excavated from a site in Egypt.{credit}© Hierakonpolis Expedition{/credit}

A new study reveals some fascinating insights into the origin story of the cat, arguably the internet’s most favorite creature and a cherished companion to countless humans.

Paleogeneticist Claudio Ottoni and his peers from KU Leuven and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences have been collecting DNA from several archaeological sites in an attempt to track down the origins and trace the ancient journeys of the domestic cat.

The scientists unearthed over 200 cat skeletons from sites in Africa, Europe and the Near East and scrutinized DNA from feline skin, hair, bones and teeth that date back to between 100 and 9,000 years ago.

The result? A revelation about how cats dispersed in the ancient world. According to the study, the domestic cat we know today originated in ancient Egypt and the Near East.

Back then, the cats had stripes, not spots – the latter cropped up during the Middle Ages, but not before. The Middle Ages is also when the cat’s coat color had started to become variant.

The ancient felines were domesticated some 10,000 years ago, mostly by farmers wishing to chase away rodents from their fields. When the farmers moved, the cats moved with them. They also spread across the old world through trade, hopping on ships to protect stocks from vermin, and jumping from one port to the next, eventually covering long distances, and traveling far and wide. Now, the domestic cat is present on all continents except Antarctica.

The cats can all be traced back to one Felis silvestris, also known as the African wildcat, originally a feral, territorial and solitary hunter. Both the Near Eastern and Egyptian populations of Felis silvestris, according to the study, contributed to the gene pool of the domestic cat at different historical times.

 

Targeted vaccines against feline dander could be the cat’s meow

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A man and a woman walk into a doctor’s office. She has a cat allergy; he has a cat. “They say, ‘You’ve got to do something or we can’t get married,’” says Michael Blaiss. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but it’s actually a typical day at Blaiss’s private allergy practice in Memphis, Tennessee. People often face tough decisions when a loved one cannot cohabit with feline companions.

Cat dander—microscopic pieces of dry cat skin coated with Fel d 1, a protein responsible for most cat allergies that is secreted by cat glands onto the skin and transferred to fur from cat saliva through grooming—elicits a reaction in an estimated 17% of individuals in the US. Antihistamines and steroids can dull the symptoms, but the only disease-modifying therapy currently available is a series of injections made of cat dander extract, a soup of proteins literally washed from cat fur and bottled. Whole allergen treatment is time consuming, involving some 30–80 shots over three to five years, and risky, with the chance of rare life-threatening anaphylactic reactions to the injections.

An Oxford, UK–based company, Circassia, hopes to change all that with its new ToleroMune cat allergy vaccine, a molecular approach to the problem. The vaccine is made of seven synthetic peptides, each only 15–20 amino acids long and derived from Fel d 1. The carefully selected peptides quiet the immune system’s aberrant T cell response but avoid activating mast cells, which cause allergic reactions and anaphylaxis.

“We know exactly what is in every vial,” says Steve Harris, Circassia’s chief executive.

In a recently published phase 2 study, 21 people received four injections of the therapeutic vaccine over a three-month period in which they were exposed to cat dander. A year after starting the treatment, these individuals showed a significantly greater reduction in nose- and eye-related symptoms than 29 participants who received a placebo and the same allergen hazard.

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