Secrets of the Cat_ Its Lore, Legend, and Lives - Barbara Holland [45]
In 1907, an expedition into Egypt sent back to the British Museum a box of 192 cat skulls from the cat burying grounds at Giza, dating from around 600 to 200 B.C. Some years later, when he got around to opening the box, Dr. T. C. S. Morrison-Scot said the skulls were of two types, one resembling Felis chaus and one Felis libyca, both small wild cats still around in North Africa today. Libyca is long-faced and big-eared, with ticked fur like our modern Abyssinians. It has white toes and is familiarly known as the Gloved Cat; tribes in the eastern Sudan still tame it from the wild. Libyca is a desert cat, chaus a jungle cat, more Asian than African, sandy brown with black tufts on its ear tips and very shy. Somehow, so late in the day of the Egyptian cat cult, they were still distinct enough for Dr. Morrison-Scot to tell apart, and hadn’t blurred together over a thousand years of close association. There were fewer of the chaus type. Most of the skulls he examined were of the libyca type but somewhat bigger than normal, and bigger than our house cats’ skulls but smaller than chaus’s. He thought these might be a separate strain, and tried calling it Felis libyca bubastis, but the idea never caught on.
The Encyclopedia Americana throws us an alternative to chaus, Felis ocreata, another African. (Unless, of course, they’re two different names for the same cat. The naming of cats, as T. S. Eliot points out, is a difficult matter.)
Some authorities say cats weren’t originally from Egypt at all, but were brought in from Ethiopia; several state firmly that they were brought by Sesotris after his conquest of Nubia. Méry suggests that they have no true wild ancestors, that the Egyptians discovered a mutation, something different that interested them enough to cosset and breed it, effectively inventing their own cats.
At different points in history we start to run across the sturdy, round-faced cat of Europe, a slender, long-faced cat in Thailand, and chubby, fuzzy cats and tailless cats in Japanese and Chinese paintings. And what of the blue-eyed jungle cats of Southeast Asia, and the chunky, long-haired Persian and the slim long-haired Angora, and the Siamese with its knobbed tail, raucous voice, and different estrous cycle? How many cats are there? Science would prefer to name a single cat, a single point of origin, a single ancestor; it would be unprofessionally messy to have various cats developing here and there from various genetic material.
To compound the problem, British authorities feel that since Britain is the only part of the world that really matters, no merely North African cat can be a real cat, a proper cat, and therefore Felis as we know her must be descended in part from Felis sylvestris, the European wildcat and a British subject that some say is still common and widespread and others say is almost extinct. Linnaeus thought he had disproved this conclusively in 1736, but many scholarly modern sources still state the connection as a recognized fact—Egyptian cat + sylvestris = proper cat—and add that our house cats still breed freely with wildcats. Other authorities, equally positive, say this rarely happens, and when it does the kittens are sickly and sterile. Some claim sylvestris has a very different bone structure from puss, and can’t be related.
We could almost conjecture that some of these science people aren’t making a clear distinction between sylvestris proper and puss herself in the woods, homeless for generations and hissing and scratching when grabbed up by marauding scientists, but still genetically one of our own.
It seems safest to go with Linnaeus on the wildcat matter. In its pictures sylvestris looks quite dauntingly savage and morose. It’s said to be untamable even when taken in infancy, and it grows up to be a burly and powerful opponent; in Scotland’s surviving tales of man versus wildcat,