In A 466-Year-Old Shipwreck Near Florida, Evidence Of The Earliest Pet Cats To Arrive In America Was Discovered
Around 42 million American households have pet cats as part of their families. It’s hard to imagine a world without them. However, such a world did exist once upon a time.
Domestic cats arrived in the Americas not too long ago. They came with European explorers about 500 years ago.
A new study has investigated the history of cats and how they became beloved pets. Researchers discovered the remains of two house cats in a 466-year-old Spanish shipwreck near Florida. They are most likely the earliest known cats in the United States.
The remains were uncovered within the wreckage of the Emanuel Point II, a Spanish ship that sank in September 1559.
It went down near what is now Pensacola, Florida. The ship was one of 11 vessels that had sailed north from Mexico on an expedition led by Tristán de Luna y Arellano.
The fleet had been anchored near the Spanish settlement of Santa María de Ochuse when a hurricane blew through.
As a result of the storm, six of the vessels sank, and another was pushed inland. Scientists found three shipwrecks from that expedition between 1992 and 2016.
Divers have been able to recover artifacts from the ships, including fragments of jars that probably contained water, wine, or olive oil.
In addition, they have encountered the remains of multiple critters, such as cockroaches, rats, and two domestic cats.
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The research team examined the feline remains more closely. One set of remains belonged to an adult, and the other was a juvenile cat.
The cats could’ve been stowaways, but it’s likely they were brought along to reduce the amount of rodents onboard. They then became friendly with the sailors during their journey.
Tests suggest that the adult cat was eating a diet mainly of fish and meats like beef, poultry, and pork. It may have hunted mice and rats, but a large portion of its diet came from other sources.
Perhaps the sailors fed the cats because they controlled the rodent population so effectively that there was nothing left for the felines to eat.
They also may have tossed food scraps to the cats out of affection. Sailors considered cats to be lucky, particularly those with extra toes.
“Their primary role may have been as commensal ratters and mousers that kept the onboard rodent population in check,” wrote the researchers.
“This does not, however, preclude the possibility that these cats were well-liked and cared for by the sailors.”
The dietary findings rule out other possible reasons the cats were brought on the ship, such as serving as food for the sailors or being raised for their fur. In some parts of medieval Europe, these were pretty common uses for cats.
For example, there is a Spanish cookbook from 1560 that includes a recipe for roasted cat. Additionally, medieval sites across Europe have yielded cat skeletons with cut marks, indicating that they were skinned for furs or butchered for meat.
Experts believe cats were domesticated roughly 12,000 years ago in the Middle East. They had spread throughout the Mediterranean region by around 400 B.C.E.
The findings were published in American Antiquity.
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