Big cats such as lions, tigers, leopards and jaguars have a partly bony hyoid and a flexible larynx that let them roar. Roaring and true purring need different throat structures, which is part of why lions roar and house cats purr. In small cats such as house cats, bobcats, lynxes, cheetahs and cougars the hyoid bone is fully hardened, and when the voice box vibrates it can make this bone resonate in a low rumble. Cheetahs have a fully hardened hyoid bone that lets them purr when they breathe in and when they breathe out.
Snow leopards cannot roar like lions or tigers. They make softer sounds such as chuffs, meows and purr-like sounds. Lions use roaring to coordinate how their pride behaves and to defend the area they share. 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.
For about half a century, scientists thought a purr needed the muscles of the voice box to tighten and relax in a steady rhythm, with the brain giving constant orders. Some researchers argue that the sounds lions and leopards made in some studies were not true purrs, only rolling growls that sounded like purrs, or that they appeared only when breathing out, 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.
A Vienna team found a special pad inside a cat's vocal folds that may explain how such a small animal can make sounds as low as 20 to 30 hertz. The way a cat's voice box makes a purr is strikingly like human creaky voice, also called vocal fry. The researchers of the 2023 study said their findings do not completely disprove the muscle idea, but show that the current understanding of purring is incomplete.
Cats can make a special urgent purr when they want food, with a cry or meow tucked inside an otherwise soft, low purr. Karen McComb, who led the University of Sussex 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. McComb suggested that a purr with an embedded cry taps into a sensitivity that people and other mammals have to sounds linked to caring for their young.
In 2017 researchers studied DNA from about 230 ancient and modern cats from Europe, Africa and southwest Asia, covering around 9,000 years, to trace where house cats came from. The 2017 DNA study found that both Near Eastern and Egyptian wildcats helped form the house cat's gene pool, at different times, in two major waves. Only six of the dozens of mummified Egyptian cats from the Ptolemaic period gave DNA results, because the DNA of the others had broken down in hot, dry places.
Cats may have domesticated themselves: wildcats chose to stay near farming settlements, where there was food and shelter, and people tolerated cats that kept pests away. People domesticated dogs by breeding for traits they wanted, but house cats mostly evolved through natural selection, as friendlier, calmer cats did better close to people. 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.
Words to know
- hyoid: throat bone
- larynx: voice box
- resonate: ring with sound
- mummified: preserved bodies
- Ptolemaic: ancient Egyptian era
