Cat brains are diminishing, and it's all due to people.

Humans are to blame for cats' decreasing brains.


Over the past 10,000 years, there has been a dramatic reduction in the size of the domesticated cat's skull and brain.

 

Because cats have been living with people for thousands of years, new studies show that their brains have shrunk.

 

In a study published on January 26 in the journal Royal Society Open Science (Felis silvestris), researchers compared the cranial measures (an indicator of brain size) of modern housecats to those of their two closest wild predecessors, the African (Felis lybica) and European (Felis silvestris) wildcats. In the last 10,000 years, the size of cats' skulls and, by extension, the size of their brains have changed a lot compared to their wild relatives.

 

Because of this, your tabby may not be any more or less intelligent than a wildcat. However, it suggests that the development of the brains of domesticated animals may have been altered in favor of tameness, as suggested by the researchers. These alterations probably start during embryonic development, when the animal is still an unformed embryo, and its neural crest cells are just beginning to form. Neural crest cells are only found in vertebrates and help build the nervous system.

 

Researchers speculated that "selection for tameness" during domestication may have slowed the migration and proliferation of neural crest cells, reducing excitability and fear. Because of this downregulation, morphological, stress response, and brain size changes may all happen at the same time.

 

The current study's researchers repeated previous investigations from the 1960s and 1970s that compared the size of domestic and wild cats' skulls. Even though these earlier experiments supported the idea that cats' brains have gotten smaller over time, several of them only compared modern cats to the European wildcat, which is now thought to be, at best, a distant relative.

 

The goal of the current paper was to bring this body of work up to date by comparing domestic cats and the African wildcat, which genetic analysis has since shown to be the closest living ancestor of the modern domestic cat.

 

Researchers confirmed that previous studies' conclusions about domestic cats' smaller brain sizes than those of African and European wildcats held up. In addition to studying purebred domestic cats and wildcat hybrids, the researchers found that the cranial measurements of the hybrids fell neatly in the middle of those of the two parent species.

 

This is proof that domestication has greatly affected cats' evolution over the past few thousand years. This is also true for many other domesticated animal species.

 

Researchers found that "changes to brain volume have been widely documented across [domesticated] species," which included sheep, rabbits, dogs, and many more.

 

In addition to shedding information on the developmental alterations brought about by the domestication of wild animals, this knowledge also raises worries about wild species that are "imperiled by hybridization with domestic animals," as the researchers put it.




Reference : https://www.livescience.com/house-cat-brain-size-shrink

Image source : https://pixabay.com/id/illustrations/malam-kisah-antik-menggambar-4028339/

Our species is responsible for the diminishing mental capacities of cats.


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