Ah! The absolute inscrutability of cats. They have fooled, manipulated, enslaved, and enraptured us for going on 12,000 years. And for all of our sophisticated techniques to unravel the mysteries of the universe, we’re still having a hard time discovering why these lovable, maddening, and unknowable creatures have deigned to share their milk bowl with us:

Your hunch is correct. Your cat decided to live with you, not the other way around. The sad truth is, it may not be a final decision.

But don’t take this feline diffidence personally. It runs in the family. And it goes back a long way—about 12,000 years, actually.

Those are among the inescapable conclusions of a genetic study of the origins of the domestic cat, being published today in the journal Science.

The findings, drawn from an analysis of nearly 1,000 cats around the world, suggest that the ancestors of today’s tabbies, Persians and Siamese wandered into Near Eastern settlements at the dawn of agriculture. They were looking for food, not friendship.

They found what they were seeking in the form of rodents feeding on stored grain. They stayed for 12 millennia, although not without wandering off now and again to consort with their wild cousins.

Fascinating findings. The date of 12,000 years is a little beyond what most scientists had surmised solely from the archaeological evidence – about 2-4 thousand years. The Egyptians were worshipping cats around 7,000 years ago so the date gleaned from DNA evidence is a little surprising.

It is a story about one of the more important biological experiments ever undertaken,” said Stephen J. O’Brien, a molecular geneticist at the National Cancer Institute’s laboratory in Frederick, Md., and one of the supervisors of the project.

“We think what happened is that cats sort of domesticated themselves,” said Carlos A. Driscoll, the University of Oxford graduate student who did the work, which required him, among other things, to befriend feral cats on the Mongolian steppes.

Stop right there. HOLD THE PRESSES! EXTRA! EXTRA!

SCIENTIST SAYS CATS “DOMESTICATED THEMSELVES”

I’d like to see a dog pull that off…

Seriously, what this proves is that scientists are extremely silly people. The truth is much more prosaic; cats domesticated us.

They probably saved early civilization by showing the stupid humans how dumb it was to keep the harvested grain on the floor of some mud hut where mice and rats would have easy access to it:

Large-scale grain agriculture began in the Near East’s Fertile Crescent. With the storage of surplus grain came mice, which fed on it and contaminated it.

Settled farming communities with dense rodent populations were a new habitat. Wildcats came out of the woods and grasslands to exploit it. They may have lived close to man—but not petting-close—for centuries.

Eventually, though, natural selection favored individual animals whose genetic makeup by chance made them tolerant of human contact. Such behavior provided them with things—a night indoors, the occasional bowl of milk—that allowed them to out-compete their scaredy-cat relatives.

For people, it was a great package—agriculture, food surplus (and all the civilizing effects that came with it), with domesticated cats thrown in to protect the wealth by eating the mice.

I wonder when they developed the ability to tug at our heartstrings with a well modulated “meow?” At what point did they realize that the simple act of looking us right in the eye, showing a face that defines animal beauty and comeliness, would make us fall in love with them? Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out when cats discovered they could get more by giving less; that the ability to manipulate us, wrap us around their paw meant that they could dole out their affections by the teaspoon rather than the bushelfull as lesser creatures like dogs do?

We will never know the answer to these questions because again, natural selection worked its magic in those areas as well. Slowly, over time, cats who were able to dominate the relationship with humans were more successful breeding due to longer life spans. Eventually, the genes that determined a cat’s behavior geared toward getting what they wanted from people won out and are with their domesticated grandchildren today.

The research shows that all domestic cats are descended from the East African wild cat. But there were wild cats in Europe and Asia as well. Why weren’t they domesticated also?

“When that technology was transferred to other cultures, so were the cats,” said Robert Wayne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California in Los Angeles. Therein lies the reason other cultures didn’t domesticate local wildcats, he said. “Why reinvent the wheel?”

This is not true with other acts of animal domestication.

Genetic studies have shown that cattle, goats, sheep, pigs and water buffalo were all domesticated at least twice in independent events. With horses, it happened many times.

And perhaps the most startling thing to emerge from this study, is that even after being domesticated, cats would escape the confines of human settlements to mix with their wildcat cousins in Europe and Africa:

The consequence of one other feline behavior—the average cat’s uncertainty about whether it wants to be indoors or out—was also written in the genes Driscoll studied.

He found that a significant fraction of wildcats in Europe, southern Africa and central Asia were hybrids. They carried genetic evidence of having tomcatted around from time to time with their domesticated relatives.

So far, genetic studies of dogs have not found this re-mixing with wolves or other wild dog species. But the geneticists have a much tougher task with dogs because it is believed they were domesticated at least 20,000 years ago and perhaps as far back as 100,000 years. And the task of tagging the DNA of all dog species would be a monumental effort.

All this is moot, of course, because cats could give a damn. They are what they are and they’re where they want to be. No power on earth can move them. And if, in the distant past, they wandered into some primitive human enclave to eat a few mice grown fat and slow from gorging themselves on the hard earned bounty of the land, I’m sure their initial impression of us must have been a good one.

Either that or they simply saw us as the only other creature on the planet who could truly appreciate their otherworldly nature.