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Your hunch is correct. Your cat decided to live with you, not the other way around. The sad truth is, it may not be a final decision.
But don’t take this feline diffidence personally. It runs in the family. And it goes back a long way — about 12,000 years, actually.
Those are among the inescapable conclusions of a genetic study of the origins of the domestic cat, being published today in the journal Science.
The findings, drawn from an analysis of nearly 1,000 cats around the world, suggest that the ancestors of today’s tabbies, Persians and Siamese wandered into Near Eastern settlements at the dawn of agriculture. They were looking for food, not friendship.
They found what they were seeking in the form of rodents feeding on stored grain. They stayed for 12 millennia, although not without wandering off now and again to consort with their wild cousins.
The story is quite different from that of other domesticated animals: cattle, sheep, goats, horses — and dogs, cats’ main rivals for human affection. It may even provide insight on the behavior of the animal that, if not man’s best friend, is certainly his most inscrutable.
“It is a story about one of the more important biological experiments ever undertaken,” said Stephen J. O’Brien, a molecular geneticist at the National Cancer Institute’s laboratory in Frederick, Md., and one of the supervisors of the project.
“We think what happened is that cats sort of domesticated themselves,” said Carlos A. Driscoll, the University of Oxford graduate student who did the work, which required him, among other things, to befriend feral cats on the Mongolian steppes.
Today, there are 37 species in the family Felidae, ranging from lions through ocelots down to little Mittens. All domestic cats are descended from the species Felis sylvestris (”cat of the woods”), which goes by the common name “wildcat.”
The species is indigenous to Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. The New World, Japan and Oceania lack wildcats. North America’s closest counterpart is the lynx.
There are five subspecies of wildcats, and they look very much like many pet cats, particularly non-pedigree ones. The Scottish wildcat, for example, is indistinguishable from a barn cat with a mackerel tabby coat. These animals, however, are a true wild species. They are not escaped pets that have become feral, or reverted to the wild.
Driscoll and his collaborators, who included Oxford zoologist David Macdonald, took blood samples and ear punch biopsies from all wildcat subspecies as well as from fancy-breed cats, non-pedigree pet cats and feral cats. They analyzed two kinds of genetic fingerprints: nuclear DNA, which carries nearly all of an animal’s genes and reflects inheritance from both parents, and mitochondrial DNA, which exists outside the cell nucleus, carries only a few genes and descends through the generations only from mothers.
Both fingerprints showed that domesticated cats around the world are most closely related to the wildcat subspecies (called lybica) that lives in the Near East. (War prevented the sampling of Iraqi wildcats, but the researchers believe those animals are of the same species as animals they collected samples from in Israel and on the Arabian Peninsula.)
One might think that people in each region would have domesticated their local wildcats. In that case, European pet cats today would genetically most closely resemble European wildcats and Chinese cats would be descended from East Asian wildcats. But that isn’t the case.
Why not?
Genetics can’t answer the question, but history and archaeology can provide a good guess.
Large-scale grain agriculture began in the Near East’s Fertile Crescent. With the storage of surplus grain came mice, which fed on it and contaminated it.
Settled farming communities with dense rodent populations were a new habitat. Wildcats came out of the woods and grasslands to exploit it. They may have lived close to man — but not petting-close — for centuries.
Eventually, though, natural selection favored individual animals whose genetic makeup by chance made them tolerant of human contact. Such behavior provided them with things — a night indoors, the occasional bowl of milk — that allowed them to out-compete their scaredy-cat relatives.
For people, it was a great package — agriculture, food surplus (and all the civilizing effects that came with it), with domesticated cats thrown in to protect the wealth by eating the mice.
“When that technology was transferred to other cultures, so were the cats,” said Robert Wayne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California in Los Angeles. Therein lies the reason other cultures didn’t domesticate local wildcats, he said. “Why reinvent the wheel?”
This is not true with other acts of animal domestication.
Genetic studies have shown that cattle, goats, sheep, pigs and water buffalo were all domesticated at least twice in independent events. With horses, it happened many times.
The consequence of one other feline behavior — the average cat’s uncertainty about whether it wants to be indoors or out — was also written in the genes Driscoll studied.
He found that a significant fraction of wildcats in Europe, southern Africa and central Asia were hybrids. They carried genetic evidence of having tomcatted around from time to time with their domesticated relatives.
[Via - Washington Post]
Man Stuck In Machinery Uses Big Toe To Call 911
As They Get Poorer, More And More Americans Sell Their Belongings On Craigslist And Flea Markets
Man arrested in Texas for trying to cash $360 billion check
Demographics Of Jobless Claims
Mexican bus drivers say they deserve tips
I killed that! Wisconsin man starts Web site devoted to roadkill.
A recent editorial (PDF) in the Journal of the American Society for Nephrology is getting wide press coverage for debunking the so-called “8×8″ theory—the popularly held belief that drinking eight 8-ounce glasses of water daily helps remove toxins, improve skin tone, and increase satiety, among other health benefits. The authors chalk up the belief to folklore, and newspaper reports claim ignorance as to its provenance. Just how long has this idea been around?
Two-hundred years, at least. The most commonly cited source for the 8×8 myth—highlighted in this 2002 review paper by a Dartmouth professor—is the U.S. government-sponsored Food and Nutrition Board.* The board’s “Recommended Dietary Allowances” from 1945 include the following advice:
A suitable allowance of water for adults is 2.5 liters daily in most instances. An ordinary standard for diverse persons is 1 milliliter for each calorie of food. Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.
According to this theory, people ignored the last part of the statement, which points out that you can get most of that water just by eating. If you actually had to drink all 2.5 liters, you’d need around 10 8-ounce glasses per day. By 1959, the concept was so entrenched that Groucho Marx could joke about self-righteous centenarians who claim that they eat “raw turkey liver” for breakfast and drink “thirty-two glasses of water a day” instead of “eight glasses a day like the rest of us.”
However, the Explainer has uncovered evidence of the 8×8 myth going all the way back to 1796, in a German text by Dr. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland called Makrobiotik. The book includes an anecdote about the surgeon general to the king of Prussia, a vibrant 80-year-old man who had “contracted the habit of drinking daily from seven to eight glasses” of cold water and thus “enjoyed much better health than in his youth.” (An English translation is available in this book from 1843.)
The hydrotherapy craze that swept through Europe and then America in the late 19th century encouraged the notion that people needed to be drinking more water. By 1900, the New York Evangelist reported that a women’s association on the Lower East Side was being instructed by a Dr. Vinton that one needed to ingest “at least eight glasses of water a day” and take “four times as much water as food.” (Incidentally, the girls were also told that it was dangerous to get one’s feet wet, that it wasn’t good to “wear many skirts,” and that their brains were “soft like jelly.”) By the 1910s and 1920s, the popular press was full of exhortations to consume six to eight glasses on a daily basis. Charles Atlas, the bodybuilder whose famous comic-strip ads were highly popular from the ’20s through the ’70s, was fond of recommending the same amount.
In more recent decades, there have been plenty of proponents of the 8×8 theory. In 1967, Dr. Irwin Stillman, one of the earliest advocates of a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet, insisted that his followers drink eight glasses of water a day in order to wash away ketones, or “ashes left in the furnace.” The controversial 1992 bestseller Your Body’s Many Cries for Water, which calls for a minimum of eight to 10 glasses of pure water a day (not coffee, not soda), probably played a role in spreading the myth, as has the bottled-water industry, which has exploded since the 1980s.
Got a question about today’s news? Ask the Explainer.
Explainer thanks Katharine Donahue of UCLA; Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania; and James Wharton of the University of Washington.
[Via - Slate.Com]
Making Real Money With Fake Clouds
Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
Door-to-door sales crews or indentured servants?
“Credit crisis…foreclosures…market crash…recession…falling dollar…bankruptcy…inflation: Why the Smart Money is Buying,” says this week’s Forbes cover. Forbes thinks it is being bravely contrarian. “Buy when blood is running in the streets,” it quotes a Rothschild. After the traffic accidents of the last 9 months, it thinks it sees an opportunity - similar to the one in 2002. Of course, everyone wants to go against the crowd, provided everyone else is doing it too.
Today, the markets are as crowded with people who believe that central bankers will save the day. Blood may be running in the streets, they say. But the ambulances are on the way. The whole mess will be cleaned up quickly. And with dividend yields near 2% and earnings ratios near 20, a ‘contrarian’ might feel a little hemmed in, like a passenger on a cheap airline.
What follows is a truly contrarian look at our modern ambulance squads…and a modest prediction: there will be more blood on the streets when they get finished.
This week, the sirens squealed in London. The Bank of England announced a new bailout plan, known as the “Special Liquidity Scheme.” The figure of 50 billion pounds was thrown about in the press, but Mervyn King said it was only an estimate. Amid the confusion and complexity of the financial crisis, the BoE’s bailout scheme is as simple and naked as Eve…and as full of mischief. Troubled banks can go to the nation’s central bank and trade their dodgy credits for good ones - government bonds. The plan is very similar to the U.S. Fed’s bailout gesture, known as the Term Auction Facility. The U.S. central bank, also in rapid response mode, exchanges U.S. Treasury bonds, thought to be the world’s safest credits, for a hodge-podge of “alternative assets,” that is, alternative to good ones. Of course, the U.S. Fed didn’t begin or end there. It also cut its rates 300 basis points.
Even the European Central Bank, with its sniffy continental sangfroid is on the scene. While it maintains its key rate at pre-emergency levels to combat inflation, its assets have been growing at a breathtaking rate - nearly 20% per year. The BCE, it turns out, is eagerly providing billions of euros to slippery borrowers, based on collateral which it admits is “less liquid” than before. It has added $115 billion of this sausage stuffing to its balance sheet in the last 12 months.
The initial question a contrarian might ask is: what, exactly, is the emergency that caused these emergency responses? What accident is so bloody and so menacing, that it has the world’s three most powerful central banks racing across town, scattering crowds and ignoring traffic signals?
On the surface, there is none. What does it matter to us if a few over-stretched banks and bankers lose money? Last time we looked, there was still full employment in Britain and America. And in Europe, where full employment is less of an issue, those who put their shoulder to the wheel last year still do so. World GDP is still going up - though not quite as fast as before. Inflation is still almost under control. As near as we can tell, God is still in his heaven. The queen is still on her throne. In the United States, stock prices are moving up…and house prices are down only about 15% from their all-time high. And U.K. property prices had barely begun to decline at all. The emergency, as near as we can tell, is only that some people are getting what they’ve got coming; central banks - essentially, a bankers’ guild - are trying to prevent it.
Rescue missions used to be rare. Between the day BoE governor Lancelot Holland administered a 4 million pound transfusion to Overend, Gurney & Co. in 1866, and the day the medics appeared at Northern Rock, 141 years elapsed. But rescues are becoming much more common, largely - we contend - because central bankers are causing more accidents. Central bankers have allowed what business analysts call “mission creep.” They used to be concerned only with protecting the value of the currency itself. As for the rest, it was up to businessmen, investors and bankers to look after themselves. But now, there’s a central banker directing traffic on every street corner. Full employment, re-election, trade balances - soon, they will be helping kittens down from the trees…while the currency goes to hell.
The last big pile up came in 2001-2002. That was such an emergency that Alan Greenspan felt the need to cut the signal lending rate in the United States down to 1% - far below the level of consumer price inflation as well as the real cost of money. This ‘emergency rate’ was left in place for far too long; it is what led to an explosion of borrowing and spending…the bubble in residential real estate…the subsequent blow-up in subprime…and today’s on-going emergency.
“Contrarian” investors, then as now, might have figured that the bottom was in by the autumn of 2002. They would have been right - to an extent. But the smartest move in 2002 was to buy neither stocks nor property. The smart money bet against central banking itself. The smart money bet that the Fed’s easy money policies would do more harm than good…and that the central bankers’ own paper currency would pay the price. The smart money bet on gold, which has more than doubled subsequently. Our guess is that gold will be the ultimate winner this time too.
Until next week,
Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning
Winner of Oddest Book Title award goes to self-help book
Millionaire goes back to McDonald’s job
It happens all the time. A knock on the door followed by a pitch from a young person who, for one good cause or another, is selling magazine subscriptions.But before getting out the checkbook, consider this: You may be looking into the eyes of a modern-day indentured servant.
Oftentimes, kids who hawk magazines door-to-door are just taking part in a school project. But some industry watchers say that when young adults join traveling sales crews, they are sometimes cut off from family, forced to work long days without having control of earnings, and subjected to emotional or physical abuse. Touted as adventurous employment with sales of about $1 billion a year, it’s an exploitation industry happening right under Americans’ noses, critics say.
These sales operations have come under renewed scrutiny since a March 25 van crash that killed seven youths and injured five others near Janesville, Wis.
That group appears to fit the profile of traveling sales crews, which tend to recruit and travel in a wide range of states and have drivers with longstanding criminal or traffic offenses, says Dorianne Beyer, general counsel of the National Child Labor Committee in New York.
Indeed, the college-age driver in the Wisconsin crash already had so many driving violations that his license wasn’t valid in Wisconsin.
But what was unusual, says Ms. Beyer, is that the accident included four minors - one of whom was killed. That brought the US Department of Labor and the FBI into an investigation that otherwise would involve only state and local agencies.
The lure of money
The desire to get rich quick may be part of the problem. Since the 1960s, there’s been a shift toward a sense of entitlement to a rich, exciting lifestyle, says Robert Fitzpatrick, co-author of a book on multilevel marketing and pyramid schemes. People from every background flock to seminars where they are told they can start making $10,000 right away if they just have the right attitude.
Despite today’s prosperity, many people feel insecure and are “pretty open to a scheme that says, ‘I’ll deliver you,’ ” Mr. Fitzpatrick explains.
Many groups promise fantasy-size profits and instead end up impoverishing people, experts say. They’ve also been criticized for imposing cult-like control over people’s thoughts and behavior.
When Earlene Williams tracked down her 18-year-old son after he joined a traveling crew, he agreed to go home only if she would promise to help the other kids involved.
As a result, she’s been running the New York-based Parent Watch since 1983, tracking the industry, helping families and law-enforcement agencies, and lobbying for federal legislation that will target the practice.
Crew managers control the books, deducting from salespeople’s commissions for expenses for hotels, food, and illegal fines for things such as a bad attitude, Ms. Williams says.
Teams that do well can gross $50,000 a week, she adds, but the salespeople rarely see that money and are often told they have to work off debts.
“Many kids do leave, but the ones who stay are afraid to leave,” she says. After seeing or experiencing abuse and humiliation, “they seem to lose the ability to look out for their own best interests.”
If travel-sales recruiters work out of a hotel room, promise exciting travel, and say the job starts immediately, stay away, Williams advises, adding that she’ll “take out a full-size ad in The New York Times the day one of those works out well for somebody.”
The Wisconsin case illustrates how difficult it can be to hold companies accountable.
The Oklahoma Labor Department was not aware of the parent business, Subscriptions Plus, before the accident, but now has fined it for not carrying workers’ compensation for 123 employees, including those in the van.
The owner argues that sales crews are independent contractors. Such claims do not always hold up in court, but many people who profit from the sales “have become very sophisticated at separating themselves out legally,” Williams says.
And because the groups are so mobile, investigating abuses can be difficult.
“It’s like a modern-day Oliver Twist story,” says Trey Davis, an Oklahoma Labor Department spokesman. Twenty-seven salespeople not involved in the accident left the area quickly, before police were able to talk to them, he says.
[Via - Rick Ross]
NJ Students Punished for Penny Payments
Why So Few People Saw The Housing Bubble Coming.
From an interview with Warren Buffet in Fortune Magazine: What Warren thinks…
Q: Are we a long way from turning a corner?
Buffett: “I think so. I mean, it seems everybody says it’ll be short and shallow, but it looks like it’s just the opposite. You know, deleveraging by its nature takes a lot of time, a lot of pain. And the consequences kind of roll through in different ways. Now, I don’t invest a dime based on macro forecasts, so I don’t think people should sell stocks because of that. I also don’t think they should buy stocks because of that.”
Buffett talks about not timing the market based on macroeconomics, but he did time the housing market perfectly. He bought a Laguna Beach, CA house in 1996 for $1.05 million (at the market bottom), and sold in 2005 for $3.5 million. It’s not like he needed the money.
Here was Buffett’s comment at the time:
“People go crazy in economics periodically. Residential housing has different behavioral characteristics, simply because people live there. But when you get prices increasing faster than the underlying costs, sometimes there can be pretty serious consequences.”
 [Via - Madconomist.Com]
The Brits Are Drowning In Debt
The Great Unwind has begun, Citigroup warns
Norwegian hospital to equip babies with anti-theft alarms