8 ms·
Cat Gap
- grubbs 11mo agoWelp. Now I'm in a wikipedia hole of how cats came to be.
- Razengan 11mo agoThe universe was created to incorporate cats.
- exasperaited 10mo agoIgnoring the much more obvious explanation that they simply buggered off to do their own thing and there was nobody around to bang a plate with a fork.
- msuniverse2026 10mo ago"We must close the cat gap." - JFK, 1960
- CalRobert 10mo agoAnimals could be bred and... slaughtered...
- corgiorgy 10mo agoI used to run a Twitter bot called @itsavailable that would mine interesting strings that were not registered .com domains and tweet them out at a regular cadence. One of its sources was the most-visited English-language Wikipedia page titles in the past hour. One of the only domains I ever bothered purchasing for myself was https://catgap.com https://catgap.com
- anileated 10mo agoHat tip on both your (new?) domain name and your username.
- cobbzilla 10mo agoThank you for brightening my day with your website. That is one adorable (and adorably annoyed-looking) cat.
- dostick 10mo agoDon’t click that link!
- meindnoch 10mo agoWarning: if you open that link you'll see a woman using her finger pulling apart a hole on a pussy.
- pfdietz 10mo agoYou are technically correct (the best kind of correct.)
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- euroderf 10mo agoCat gap? Divine intervention. The divinity? Cats.
- felineflock 10mo agoThe cat gap is due to the long time it took for the mutant descendants of Noah's cats to get to America.
- orbital-decay 10mo agoI'm surprised that sampling bias is not in the list. Is it possible that these fossils simply haven't been found yet?
- hurturue 10mo agohave you tried turning the computer off on on?
- notepad0x90 10mo agoI think the postulation is that the cats would be so abundant, it shouldn't be hard to find their fossils.
- madaxe_again 10mo agoThat was my first conclusion, too - the absence of something in the fossil record does not mean that it was not there, just that it did not fossilise. For one, predators in general often have more gracile build, high power to weight ratio - and don’t fossilise well. They’re also much rarer than herbivores, of course. This means the signal in the fossil record is much weaker and any deviation seems much greater, as you have to turn up the gain to get meaningful data. Perhaps cats during that period were predominantly dry desert hunters - it is a common niche for felidae - and that environment produces checks wristwatch few fossils. Perhaps there was another critter extant during that period that just found the crunch of cat bones irresistible, and they all got scavenged. Perhaps they developed culture and cremated their dead. Dunno. All that said the E-O was a big transition and it likely did result in gigadeaths, and predators would have been harder hit, ultimately and proportionally.
- usrusr 10mo agoSimilar thoughts crossed my mind as well. But then there's the repopulation with a species that can be traced from Asia. The pre-gap felines just aren't part of the post-gap set. If some were descendants of some endemic low-fossilization branch, chances are they'd be connected across the gap through similarities.
- vlachen 10mo agoAn obvious failure of the Cat Distribution System.
- verbify 10mo agoI once was thinking that if intelligent machines surpassed human intelligence, the end game would be human intelligence would atrophy but the machines would continue to serve us. Then I had a humorous thought - what if this already happened, i.e. cats were superintelligent, invented humans to serve them and then they had no need for their own intelligence.
- colordrops 10mo agoThis is sort of the story of The Time Machine.
- nakedneuron 10mo agoThis is brilliant. So, if machines will be decent servants to the cats, will humans get x-ed out of the equation?
- peanball 10mo agoA topic of the “Three Robots” episode of Death Love & Robots, kind of. Sorry for the fandom link. https://lovedeathrobots.fandom.com/wiki/Three_Robots#:~:text=On%20the%20way,extend%20their%20vacation%22. https://lovedeathrobots.fandom.com/wiki/Three_Robots#:~:text...
- gradus_ad 10mo agoIt's funny to think that no matter how our technology develops, cats will be right there along for the ride, completely ignorant of it all. It's humorously comforting to think of an interstellar civilization powered by fusion and AGI serving cats just as they're served now. Scratching posts on starships seems to be inevitable.
- b112 10mo agoThis seems like a book. Humans extinct for a billion years, AGI and robots tasked to feed and "take care of the cats". I imagine entire cities, houses built, all empty save cat and humanform robot.
- lucketone 10mo agoSo during what period cats were missing? Duration is clear, start and end not clear
- david_shaw 10mo ago> The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 million to 18.5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America. 25M - 18.5M years ago.
- lucketone 10mo agoIn my defence, word “ago” was on the other line, so I kind of skipped it.
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- Sharlin 10mo agoThere are many fascinating things about cats, but one of the things I often think about is how interesting it is that an animal of such solitary nature became domesticated so easily, and how social – and socially intelligent – domestic cats came to be, despite stereotypes. To the point that many housecats, and entire breeds, are called "dog-like" in their demeanor. Female feral cats also form social groups, "colonies", though unfixed males are certainly more territorial. This is evidently an example of neoteny, the retention of juvenile traits in adulthood, seeing that most felids do have a social period while living with their mother and littermates.
- p_l 10mo agoCats are actually very social animals, they just don't firm similar pack structures to dogs With modem technology it became feasible to observe cats without disruption and it showed communal behaviours, including communal care for offspring and IIRC even bringing food to share. All along the line of somewhat transitionally joined communities instead of more stable groups
- TheOtherHobbes 10mo agoThere are some interesting reels showing cats apparently learning English using speech buttons. Cats are very communicative, which suggests they're strongly social, in the broadest sense.
- Sharlin 10mo agoYes, this is (outdoors, stray, or feral) domestic cats, which is exactly what I mentioned. And as I said, it's largely the females and their juvenile offspring that form colonies – unfixed adult males, while certainly capable of having friendly social encounters on "no cat's lands", definitely don't willingly share their territory with other adult males. But my point was that their immediate ancestor (and practically still the same species – they easily interbreed) the African wildcat is not similarly gregarious, and neither is almost any other felid, big or small.
- 10mo ago
- ursAxZA 10mo agoI’ve always wondered what it would feel like to dream as a cat. I don’t think I’ve ever had a dream where my body actually changed shape. Being loved just for existing seems like a pretty solid evolutionary strategy.
- aitchnyu 10mo agoAlso helps if you are aided by a microbe for your food sources (mice and humans) that rewires their brain to be more attracted to cats.
- the_af 10mo ago> I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to dream as a cat If you haven't already, read "A Dream of a Thousand Cats", one of the Sandman stories. It was also adapted by Netflix as the last episode of season 1 of The Sandman.
- catlover76 10mo ago[dead]
- ursAxZA 10mo agoThanks — I’ll read it tonight and become a cat in my sleep. Though I suppose I’ll need Scheherazade to guide me there first.
- qwertytyyuu 10mo agoI’m disappointed this wasn’t about felines
- DonHopkins 10mo agoFor more cat facts, see CatFACS, cat --help, and man cat. https://animalfacs.com/catfacs_new https://animalfacs.com/catfacs_new
- IndianShitbombs 10mo ago[flagged]
- mjd 10mo agoI was a bit disappointed that this didn't turn out to be analogous to the “bee space”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive#Bee_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive#Bee_space
- rsynnott 10mo agoMr President, we most not allow a cat gap!
- bigbadfeline 10mo agoThis is probably the funniest comment section I've read on HN. Congrats to all.