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garote
Every time you indulge in the basic wonderful act of petting a cat who is sitting on your lap, you are cashing in on a very long-term investment. One made by humanity and cats, training each other to enjoy their company; an investment that has been going on for tens of thousands of years. Longer than anyone can even really comprehend.
That’s a thousand generations of your ancestors laying groundwork, so you can enjoy this weird connection. (And the more you think about it, the weirder it is.)
Even more delightful: For the vast majority of that time, your ancestors didn’t have this particular goal in mind. They just wanted a cheap mouse exterminator.
In my cat book, I recently read that domestic cats have been shaped over time to emit sounds that more closely resemble those of a crying child, and that even extends to the purr: Many cats add a little bit of their "meow" voice to it on the out-breath, for an extra splash of those endearing high frequencies.
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Date: 2023-06-08 10:16 pm (UTC)Great idea about meowing, but I'm not sure about the purpose of having cats for the vast majority of that time. We don't know what kind of people were our ancestors. The general idea of them being villains does not match what we see in the last e.g. century. Also, how about Neanderthals? Did they have cats? They did not have dogs.
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Date: 2023-06-08 10:33 pm (UTC)For chunks of time, cats were vilified in some parts of the world, but not worldwide... For example in the bad old days of burning witches, cats were accused of being agents of The Devil. And in plague times in Europe and North Africa they were blamed for spreading plague.
It's true, I suppose we can't really know what kind of people our ancestors were. But you don't have to go back very far before we're all related. I do know that cats were generally used for utilitarian things: Either as rodent killers, a source of fur, or as animal sacrifices to bring good luck in this world or the next. On the other hand, it's hard to find evidence of cats jut hanging around being enjoyed, and harder still to gauge the proportion of that to other things...
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Date: 2023-06-09 12:00 am (UTC):) So, it remains a mystery. Just one argument: no cats bones in the caves.
See, I was also wondering, e.g. in Arizona or NM, around the caves where ancient people lived... no cemetery! Nobody buried nobody.