Did cats domesticate themselves?

Cats probably did it mostly themselves. The domestic cat comes from the African wildcat of the Near East and Egypt, and the process was long and gradual rather than a single event. It started as a commensal arrangement: wildcats were drawn to early farming settlements because of the rodents that thrived around the grain. People tolerated the hunters, and the cats took the free mice.

That is why scientists describe cats as having effectively self-domesticated. Unlike most domestic animals, cats were never put through strong selective breeding, and they kept ancestral traits such as their hunting behaviour. Some researchers call them only partially domesticated. Intensive breeding of cats only began about 200 years ago, and it has focused almost entirely on looks.

The evidence for this is patchy but charming. By about 9,500 years ago, people in the Eastern Mediterranean were keeping cats closely enough to carry them to Cyprus, where a cat was found buried with a human skeleton. The wildcat is not native to the island, so people must have moved it. In Egypt, a swamp cat from around 3700 BC had healed fractures, a sign that people had probably cared for it for weeks.

Being close to people is not enough to make a species domestic. Ancient people in East Asia tried the same with leopard cats, and it failed. Cats later travelled the world, first with Mediterranean traders and the Silk Road, then on European ships that carried them to fight rodents in the cargo.