In 2023 a 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. 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. The researchers of the 2023 study said their findings do not completely disprove that muscle idea, but show that the current understanding of purring is incomplete, as of November 2026.
Why cats purr is argued as well. A 2003 Scientific American answer argued that it is more likely a purr is a way to communicate, and perhaps a way for the cat to help itself heal, than a sign that the cat is simply happy. The answer reported that sound frequencies in the purr range can improve bone density and promote healing, though this does not prove why cats purr. Because cats rest so much to save energy, one proposal is that purring is a low-energy way to keep muscles and bones working, but the answer called this only possible.
Scientists say cats are not as domesticated as dogs, which genetic evidence suggests were domesticated between 14,000 and 30,000 years ago. 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. 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.
The domestic cat's DNA traces back to a wildcat called Felis silvestris lybica, which lives in North Africa and the Near East. Researchers have long said cats were first domesticated by early farmers in the Near East about 10,000 years ago, as of November 2026. The oldest known cat burial is in Cyprus, where a person and a cat were buried together 9,500 years ago. Yet some genetic evidence suggests cats may have been domesticated much later, and that the Cyprus cat may not be a direct ancestor of today's cats.
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 grain idea in China by chemistry: millet raises a form of carbon in bones, and 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.
It is still unclear whether Egyptian house cats came from cats imported from the Near East or from a second, separate domestication in Egypt. 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. Scientists have little evidence of how skittish, territorial wildcats became the tolerant companions that appear in Egyptian paintings from about 4,000 years ago.
People began deliberately breeding cats only in the past few centuries, much later than dogs. 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. House cats keep many of their wild instincts, because feral cats and house cats regularly interbreed, as of November 2026.
Words to know
- domesticated: tamed over generations
- feral: gone wild
- millet: a grain
- vocal: of the voice
- interbreed: mate together
