Humans Are Making Cats Dumber
This explains a lot!
A new study confirms that cat brains are smaller than they used to be.
As cats have become domesticated over the last 10,000 years or so, their brains have shrunk significantly in size, a new study confirms – a finding that could lead to important new insights into how animals adapt when they start being regularly kept by human beings.
Researchers compared the size of craniums (an indicator of brain size) between domestic cats (Felis catus) and wild cats from Europe and Africa, now genetically confirmed to be the ancestral species that domestic cats have slowly been evolving from. The team also looked at hybrids of wild and domestic cats and found that domestication is making cats dumber…
Related: Science has proven It: Cats Are Psychos…
Cat brain size is something that researchers have been looking into since the 1960s and 1970s, and this trend of smaller brains appearing in domesticated animals has also been observed in sheep, dogs, and rabbits. It certainly seems that something significant is going on here.
The researchers put forward an existing idea that natural selection for tameness in domestication leads to the production of fewer neural crest cells in the animals (linked to excitability and fear). That in turn could feasibly lead to changes in stress response, brain size, and overall body morphology.
So what this means is that humans have made cats more anxious, stressed out and stupid!
Well done humans! Well done!
