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Asked by tjputler50 to Sofia, Tommy on 22 Nov 2013.
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Sofia Franco answered on 22 Nov 2013:
Ahahah love it 🙂 I guess we can only guess, since we cannot possibly predict it! I would say that however they evolve it needs to be advantageous for them or help them survive better 🙂 as they mostly now live in association with humans, I would say that there is a high probability that they will become cuter (since this is quite a useful skill to get food from humans!)! Though if I had to guess, I would say that what will play a big impact is how we select them artificially and which breeds become popular! Though most cat breeds are recent (less than 100 years), they mostly come from the domestication of wild populations just from 8 ancestral groups and not so much by artificial selection, as dogs, which were also selected by performance, while cats keep being selected by beauty and elegance! However as breeding intensifies, some diseases also become dominant and this is often something really important!
This is of course just valid for cats in captivity! Wild cats will evolve depending on how the environment changes, and how they need to adjust to remain efficient predators, as well as if their prey changes, in which case, they need to find new strategies and this might lead to some adaptations or others. Also 10.000 years is not such a long time in evolution 🙂 in fact cats are tough to have been domesticated just that long ago and they do look pretty similar to what they look like today (at least in the paintings in Egypt of about 3.500 years ago!), but they have been around for way way longer and big cats (tigers and others) are known to be at least 6 million years old!
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Comments
Tommy commented on :
Hmmm, been watching “Red Dwarf” at all?? (for those who don’t know it, a space ship’s crew is wiped out, with only the pregnant cat remaining, after a million years or so, that population of cats evolves into a bipedal “hominid”, called the Kat, obsessed with self-grooming)
Like Sofia said, 10,000 years isn’t particularly long in geological time. Though in that time, there are likely to be fewer large cat species, even the wild European (incl. Scottish) Wildcat’s populations are diminishing. Evolution can be predictive, as in the long term an ecosystem with a stable climatic history is likely to eventually consist of large herbivores hunted by large predators. Problem is, we don’t always know which lineages are going to be those larger animals. In the past it has been dinosaurs. Australia before humans there were gigantic marsupial “rhinos”, hunted by predatory giant kangeroos and marsupial wolves. All this with smaller species of predator and herbivore and omnivore and scavenger all the way down the food chain. In the Northern Hemisphere and Africa, large cats or wolves or bears form the apex predator. Within cats, these consist of tigers, lions, leopards, snow leopards, Jaguar, Puma. Smaller species of cat include lynx, servals, jungle cats, ocelots, fishing cats, Golden Cats. Even smaller cats include our own domestic cat, European Wild Cat, the Rusty Spotted Cat, the Margay, Sand Cats. And Cheetah are an extremely specialised kind of cat. Oh my. Such diversification and they are all predators of different sizes. A lot of them are threatened with extinction. Lynx seem to be doing better than most, but that is being generous. Otherwise, its not looking good for any cat other than the domesticated cat. If thats all that is left, then I can see these evolving traits that would (1) endear them to human carers, such as larger eyes, rounded faces, more baby-like sounds; (2) be more adept at survivng urban landscapes as feral cats, maybe with broader diets, so with the teeth becoming more blunter for scavenging; (3) reverting to the wild-type for those feral cats that move away from urban areas and adopt more ancestral life histories. If human pressures diminish after this, who knows? Maybe they could evolve to be larger and a new version of lions and tigers and leopards and cheetahs will evolve. Will take millions of years for that to happen though.