House cat skulls have gotten significantly smaller over the last 10,000 years, and so have their brains.
New research has shown that thousands of years of human dependence has caused the cat brains to shrink. They have compared domesticated cats with two of their closest wild ancestors, African (Felis lybica) and European wildcats (Felis silvestris). The team found that cranium size — and therefore brain size — in domesticated cats has shrunk significantly over the past 10,000 years or so compared with their wild ancestors.
This doesn't necessarily mean that your tabby is dumber than a wildcat. But, according to one hypothesis, it shows that prioritizing tameness in domesticated animals may have inadvertently changed the ways those animals' brains develop, the researchers said. These changes likely begin when an animal is still an embryo and just beginning to develop its neural crest cells — a special type of cell unique to vertebrates, which plays a key role in the development of the nervous system, among other things.
They say - "Selection for tameness in the domestication of animals may have caused a downregulation in the migration and proliferation of neural crest cells, leading to decreased excitability and fear," the researchers wrote in their study. "However, this downregulation may also cause correlated changes to morphology, stress response and brain size."
"Changes to cranial volume have been well documented across [domesticated] species, including sheep, rabbits, dogs and many more," the researchers wrote.
Understanding this not only shines a light on some of the developmental changes that domestication incurs on wild animals, but also raises concerns about wild species that are "threatened by hybridization with domestic animals," the researchers concluded.
PS: If the cats could speak, most probably it might say there are 69 lakhs without any brains. So what?
New research has shown that thousands of years of human dependence has caused the cat brains to shrink. They have compared domesticated cats with two of their closest wild ancestors, African (Felis lybica) and European wildcats (Felis silvestris). The team found that cranium size — and therefore brain size — in domesticated cats has shrunk significantly over the past 10,000 years or so compared with their wild ancestors.
This doesn't necessarily mean that your tabby is dumber than a wildcat. But, according to one hypothesis, it shows that prioritizing tameness in domesticated animals may have inadvertently changed the ways those animals' brains develop, the researchers said. These changes likely begin when an animal is still an embryo and just beginning to develop its neural crest cells — a special type of cell unique to vertebrates, which plays a key role in the development of the nervous system, among other things.
They say - "Selection for tameness in the domestication of animals may have caused a downregulation in the migration and proliferation of neural crest cells, leading to decreased excitability and fear," the researchers wrote in their study. "However, this downregulation may also cause correlated changes to morphology, stress response and brain size."
"Changes to cranial volume have been well documented across [domesticated] species, including sheep, rabbits, dogs and many more," the researchers wrote.
Understanding this not only shines a light on some of the developmental changes that domestication incurs on wild animals, but also raises concerns about wild species that are "threatened by hybridization with domestic animals," the researchers concluded.
PS: If the cats could speak, most probably it might say there are 69 lakhs without any brains. So what?
