The history of the world according to cats - Eva-Maria Geigl

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On May 27, 1941, the German battleship Bismarck sank in a fierce firefight, leaving only 118 of her 2,200 crew members alive. But when a British destroyer came to collect the prisoners, they found an unexpected survivor, a black and white cat clinging to a floating plank. For the next several months, this cat hunted rats and raised British morale until a sudden torpedo strike shattered the hull and sank the ship. But, miraculously, not the cat. Nicknamed Unsinkable Sam, he rode to Gibraltar with the rescued crew and served as a ship cat on three more vessels, one of which also sank before retiring to the Belfast home for sailors. Many may not think of cats as serviceable sailors or cooperative companions of any kind, but cats have been working alongside humans for thousands of years, helping us just as often as we help them. So how did these solitary creatures go from wild predator to naval officer to sofa sidekick? The domestication of the modern house cat can be traced back to more than 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent at the start of the Neolithic era. People were learning to bend nature to their will, producing much more food than farmers could eat at one time. These Neolithic farmers stored their excess grain in large pits and short clay silos. But these stores of food attracted hordes of rodents, as well as their predator, Felis sylvestris libica, the wildcat found across North Africa and Southwest Asia. These wildcats were fast, fierce, carnivorous hunters, and they were remarkably similar in size and appearance to today's domestic cats. The main differences being that ancient wildcats were more muscular, had striped coats, and were less social towards other cats and humans. The abundance of prey in rodent-infested greeneries drew in these typically solitary animals. And as the wildcats learned to tolerate the presence of humans and other cats during mealtime, we think that farmers likewise tolerated the cats in exchange for free pest control. The relationship was so beneficial that the cats migrated with Neolithic farmers from Anatolia into Europe and the Mediterranean. Vermin were a major scourge of the seven seas. They ate