PassedThousands of years of domestication by humans, the brains of domestic cats have shrunk. Researchers compared the skull size of modern domestic cats with their two closest wild ancestors, the Afro-Asian wildcat and the European wildcat, and found that the size of the domestic cat's head and brain has shrunk significantly over the past 10,000 years.
But that doesn't mean your pet cat has to be dumber than a feral cat. However, according to some hypothesis, the domestication of domestic cats by humans has irreversibly changed the way their brains develop. These changes may occur during the kitten embryonic period, when the neural spinal cells are just beginning to develop. Neural spinal cells are a class of cells unique to vertebrates and play an important role in the development of the nervous system. "Humans in the process of domesticating domestic cats continue to select docile individuals, and this behavior may down-regulate the migration and proliferation activities of domestic cat neural spinal cells, resulting in reduced excitability and fear," the researchers wrote. Moreover, this down-regulation may also affect the cat's morphology, stress response, and brain size.
The researchers drew on several studies from the sixties and seventies of the 20th century to compare the skull sizes of domestic and wild cats. These studies have concluded that the domestic cat's brain is shrinking significantly, but some of them have only compared modern domestic cats to European wildcats, which scientists have now excluded from the direct ancestors of domestic cats. They also compared the head size of domestic cats with Afro-Asian wildcats, which are the closest surviving ancestors to domestic cats, as confirmed by genetic studies. The team found that the findings of past studies still hold trueThe head size of domestic cats is 25% smaller than that of wild cats
The researchers also measured data from many wild-cat and domestic cat hybrids, and found that their skulls were just somewhere between those of wild and domestic cats. All data suggest that human domestication has had a significant impact on the evolution of domestic cats over the past few thousand years, and that this phenomenon is also present in other domestic animals. Understanding this not only makes us more aware of the changes that domestication has brought to wildlife, but also leads us to worry about the threat that wild animals themselves are threatened when they are crossed with domesticated animals.