Cats can make a special urgent purr when they want food. A cry or meow is tucked inside an otherwise soft, low purr. In a University of Sussex study, listeners who had never owned a cat still rated the purrs cats made when asking for food as more urgent and less pleasant than purrs made at other times. The cats would not make these urgent purrs for strangers, so the researchers trained owners to record their own cats. When the researchers digitally removed the embedded cry from the purrs, listeners rated the calls as significantly less urgent.
Karen McComb, who led the work, thinks the cry is present at a low level in ordinary purring and that cats learn to exaggerate it when it works on people. Not every cat uses solicitation purring. It seems to develop most often in cats that have a one-on-one bond with their owner rather than in large households.
In the 1800s, scientists split cats into two groups: small cats that could purr but not roar, and big cats that could roar but not purr. Today scientists debate whether the old split is too simple. A 2002 review found that 20 of 36 cat species purr, including some big cats such as lions and leopards, as of November 2026. A 2023 study in Current Biology reported that cat voice boxes taken from cats that had died could make purr-range sounds when air was blown through them, with no brain signals and no muscle action. The researchers of that study said their findings do not completely disprove the muscle idea, but show that the current understanding of purring is incomplete.
In 2013 researchers reported small cats hunting grain-stealing rodents around a farming village in central China about 5,300 years ago. Scientists tested the idea that grain stores drew cats to farms by chemistry in China. Millet raises a form of carbon in bones. That carbon rise showed in the village's people, pigs, dogs and cats. Today's house-cat DNA looks more closely related to the Near Eastern wildcat than to the Chinese one, so the Chinese cats may not be the source of modern pets.
Some genetic evidence suggests cats may have been domesticated much later than 10,000 years ago, as of November 2026. The same evidence suggests that the cat buried with a person in Cyprus 9,500 years ago may not be a direct ancestor of today's cats. It is still unclear whether Egyptian house cats came from cats imported from the Near East or from a second, separate domestication in Egypt. A coat-color variant appeared at high frequency only after the Middle Ages, suggesting that people directed cat breeding later than for most other domesticated animals. Scientists have little evidence of how skittish, territorial wildcats became the tolerant companions that appear in Egyptian paintings from about 4,000 years ago.
Words to know
- solicitation: asking for something
- embedded: tucked inside
- skittish: easily scared
- millet: a grain
- domestication: taming over generations
