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ON A regular basis, I wonder why we have a cat. This thought was most recently prompted by Peggy jumping onto a dresser and knocking off a ceramic bowl, which smashed. By the time you read this, she will have done something else to make me question my choice of pet.

Unlike dogs, which are dependent on us for everything, including their emotional well-being, cats seem to be sociopaths. Most cat owners (if owner is even the word) have entertained the suspicion that our feline companions would abandon us if we found ourselves unable to open their food containers. Sure, Peggy comes for cuddles every so often, but she might just be looking for warmth. In fact, despite cats having lived among people for thousands of years, it is questionable whether this has done anything to tame them.

However, it may be that cats are just misunderstood. Compared with dogs, they express themselves far more subtly, so that many of us don’t understand what their gestures and behaviours mean. Recent experiments suggest that cats are more socially intelligent and attuned to familiar humans than we realise. These studies even indicate that cats like us (I know, I can’t quite believe it either). What’s more, genetic investigations are getting a grip on just how domesticated cats really are. The findings may make you see your moggy in a whole new light.

Cats and dogs are the most popular pets in the world, yet the two behave very differently towards us. Dogs will rush to the front door in excitement when you come home, whereas cats appear aloof and indifferent. The story of how these species came to live alongside humans offers some answers as to why.

For a start, the wild ancestors of cats were fairly solitary, whereas dogs evolved from wolves, which are highly social creatures. Felines seem to have started on the path to domestication around 10,000 years ago in the eastern Mediterranean, sometimes called the Near East. Archaeological evidence includes a 2004 report that a on the island of Cyprus, in a grave dating to 9500 years ago. This ancient link between cat and human is supported by growing genetic evidence.

at the University of Missouri has collected DNA from cats for three decades and looked at a range of genetic markers to explore their evolutionary history. “In the end, the story is all the same,” she says. In 2008, her team from five continents. “The highest diversity tends to be in the Near East,” indicating that this is where the population originates, she says. Similarly, in a study from November, Lyons and her colleagues obtained DNA from over 1000 cats, and again found that the .

The timing is significant. Cats started hanging out near humans around the time that people in the eastern Mediterranean started farming, instead of hunting and gathering. This change in lifestyle meant people accumulated stores of grains like wheat. “It attracted rodents and other pests,” says at the University of Warsaw in Poland. “The increased number of rodents attracted the cats.”

In other words, there is no reason to suppose that humans deliberately domesticated cats. “Cats found it is good to be close to the people because the food is there,” says Popović. “Also, people found it is good to have cats around.” If anything, cats domesticated themselves.

In 2014, a team that included Lyons described the , obtained from an Abyssinian cat called Cinnamon. Compared with wildcats, several regions of this genome showed signs of having evolved under natural selection. They included genes thought to be involved in fear conditioning – the ability to develop fear responses to previously innocuous stimuli – and learning about rewards. The key transition seems to have been that some cats became more tolerant of humans, perhaps because they were bolder or less afraid. – and so evolution favoured cats that were less scared of humans.

Route to domestication

As time went on, the human-cat relationship deepened. In ancient Egypt, people often mummified cats. Lyons and her colleagues have used to show that they were domestic, not wild. Later, the Roman Empire would carry domestic cats far and wide.

In a study published last November, Popović and her colleagues found evidence that 8000 years ago – or perhaps that they interbred with Eurasian cats, which picked up some of their distinctive DNA as a result. This may explain a 2018 study showing that cats living in central Europe , 2000 years before the Romans.

The wild ancestors of domestic cats are referred to as African wildcats or Near Eastern wildcats, depending on who you ask. The confusion arises because the various wildcat species and subspecies all interbreed to some extent. This mating free-for-all continues to the present day.

It is only in the past 200 years that humans have started selectively breeding cats, generally to produce particular appearances rather than for practical purposes. But most cats aren’t part of these breeding programmes and mate as they please – in contrast to dogs, which, for centuries, have been selectively bred for purposes ranging from hunting to fitting in handbags. And unlike dogs, most cats still go out and perform their natural behaviours like hunting. In fact, cats have considerable control over their daily routines compared with other domesticated animals. “This is where we get into cats being semi-domesticated,” says Lyons. “If cats were all turned loose, they would probably do pretty good, just living on their own and going out and hunting birds and mice and rats and lizards, and surviving.” This means that there simply isn’t such a strong need for cats to be in tune with humans.

This doesn’t stop us anthropomorphising them in a big way. Have you ever wondered if you are alone in talking to your cat in the same high-pitched, happy voice that we use to address babies and children? Dog owners talk to their pets in this way, and in a , at Paris Nanterre University and her colleagues showed that cat owners do it too. “We recorded humans talking to their cats,” she says, “and everybody was doing it.”

Are we kidding ourselves? Maybe not. Close study of the behaviour of cats reveals that they are more attuned to us than we realise, and it isn’t just cupboard love. “There are a lot of stereotypes surrounding cat behaviour,” says at Unity College in Maine. “However, many of these ideas are not supported by the current science.”

Cats know when we are talking to them, for example. In a , de Mouzon and her colleagues recorded cat owners talking, both in the high-pitched voice and normally. They also recorded strangers saying the same things. When the cats heard their owners talking in the high-pitched voice, they changed their behaviours: variously looking around, becoming still or moving their ears and tails. However, they didn’t react to the strangers talking in the high-pitched voice. “They don’t consider all humans the same,” says de Mouzon. “They really have a special feeling when their owner is addressing them.”

This is just one approach that is shining light on feline social skills. In the past few years, a group of Japanese researchers has made a string of surprising discoveries. In 2019, research co-led by at the University of Tokyo found that ; their ears and tails moved differently when they heard recordings of their owners saying their names compared with other words that sounded similar. But your pet cat will still probably ignore you when you call it. “Cats are not evolved to respond to human cues,” Saito told 91av at that time. “They will communicate with humans when they want. That is the cat.”

Other research has revealed that cats are attuned to their owners in other ways. In 2021, the Japanese team, this time led by at Kyoto University, showed that cats can mentally “map” where their owners are in the room just by listening to their voices. When recorded voices were played from different speakers, making it sound like the human had teleported from one side of the room to the other, the – seemingly surprised. “That is how carefully they listen to humans,” says Takagi.

Similarly, in a , de Mouzon and her colleague Gérard Leboucher, also at Paris Nanterre University, found that cats approached more quickly if the researchers said their names and offered their hand, compared with only one of these modes of communication. This indicated that the cats could integrate multiple signals from humans. Furthermore, Takagi and her colleagues have found that cats – which they tested by comparing the cat’s reaction when their owner petted a realistic-looking toy cat (a potential rival) or a furry cushion.

Perhaps the most striking evidence comes from Vitale. In a , she and her colleagues presented cats with a choice of four stimuli: food, toy, scent or interaction with a human. For most cats, humans were their favourite, with food coming second.

Emotional attachment

Vitale followed that up with a in which she explored the nature of cats’ emotional attachment to their owners. She used a test that is also deployed, with modifications, on human infants. One by one, 70 kittens aged 3 to 8 months were taken into an unfamiliar room by their owners. After 2 minutes, the owner left and the kitten was left alone for 2 minutes. Then the owner returned. Most of the kittens – 64 per cent – displayed a secure emotional attachment.

When their owners returned, the kittens promptly interacted with them and seemed pleased to see them, then, reassured, confidently resumed exploring the room. This mirrors what is seen in human infants who have secure relationships with their parents and caregivers. “Secure cats see their caregiver as a source of comfort and security,” says Vitale. “This study demonstrates that cats can form strong bonds with humans.”

It seems that we have misunderstood our cats. Some of the confusion has arisen because they don’t make big demonstrative gestures in the way dogs do, says de Mouzon. “They are very subtle animals.” Cats haven’t evolved the muscles to raise their eyebrows to make puppy-dog eyes, for example. But evidence accumulated over the past decade shows that cats have, despite appearances, developed many social skills to help navigate their human-centred world.

I wonder whether cats are changing, gradually becoming more domesticated as they spend more time indoors in suburban houses and less time on farms. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to tell: nobody carried out behavioural tests on cats in the Middle Ages (when, according to from that time, they played a central role in daily life). And we don’t yet have a time series of DNA from cats from different centuries to see if they are still evolving.

But what is clear is that cats like Peggy do feel an attachment to their human attendants. As I sweep up the remains of the bowl that she broke, that is reassuring to know.

An inexplicable love of boxes

It is a curious fact that all cats love sitting in boxes. Not just domestic cats: do it too.

It "makes a lot of sense" if you think about cat behaviours, says Gabriella Smith at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, Austria. A box exerts gentle pressure on the cat's sides, which might be similar to the feeling of cuddling up with littermates as a kitten. "There's also the fact that cats are ambush predators," she says. "Maybe they are attracted to boxes because they can hide and sneak up on things."

So far, so sensible, but why do cats also like sitting on pieces of paper, or flat surfaces that look like boxes?

This was documented on Twitter in 2017, when many cat owners taped the outlines of shapes onto their floors and watched their cats promptly sit inside. The hashtag trended and the phrase "if I fits, I sits" entered common parlance.

Four years later, Smith and her colleagues confirming that cats will sit inside a Kanizsa square, which uses four circles, each with a quarter cut out, in an arrangement that creates the illusion of a square. She doesn't know why. "The jury's still out on that one."

However, Charlotte de Mouzon at Paris Nanterre University says there may be a prosaic explanation. "If you put something new in the house, [cats] will need... to put their scent on it to mark it," she says. This helps them feel secure in their environment. "And sitting on something is a way to put their scent for cats," she says.