So not all meows are the same.

Absolutely.

And again, people who live with cats know that they make different meows in different contexts.

And clearly they're trying to tell us different things by the way they meow.

But the question is, is there a cat language that we just need to decipher? And there was actually a researcher about 20 years ago now who decided to investigate that.

And what he did was he did a project where he went to people's houses and met their cats and then got those cats to meow in several different situations.

One was the cat was being stroked very nicely, very pleasant situation.

regardless if I can get you to communicate.

Uh, what have these lizards taught us about how e-evolution happens?

Well, the reason that, that I've spent my career studying them, as have many other people, is two things.

One is they are remarkably diverse.

There are 400 species of them found throughout their range, yes, and as many as 15 species can occur in one place.

Um, so they're a great evolutionary success story, and there's particularly interesting aspects of how species have adapted to the environment multiple times in the same way.

For example, you have species on Cuba, Jamaica, uh, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico all using the same type of habitat, and they've evolved the same adaptations to do that.

Now, that's a, a, a, a feat- uh, a phenomenon called convergent evolution.

Um, what does that mean from an evolutionary perspective when, when we hear that, you know, cats domesticated themselves?

And cats are, he says, a

bit wild.

They're not very different from their ancestor, which is something called the African wildcat, Whereas most of the domestic animals with which we live are quite different.

Consider the difference between a dog and a wolf, or a pig and a wild boar.

But cats aren't very different.

They haven't changed very much at all, which means they can also revert back to living a wild existence relatively easily.

In some countries, up to 80% of people have it.

It's been sort of a wild west of studies showing all kinds of possibilities.

And somebody said, "Let's go get that cat and make it a pet," or it had some other agricultural purpose, or h- what was the path to domestication?

Well, the probable path, and this is actually very hard to, to study actually, but what, what seems very likely is that when people started living in villages and growing crops, and, you know, agriculture really took off, well, as, as you know, when, when farmers grow crops, there's the good season and the bad season.

So you grow as much food as you can when the seasons are right, and then you store the food for the rest of the v- rest of the year in granaries or whatever.Well, when that happens, uh, the logical y- obviously what happens next is that rodents are attracted.

Mice and rats see this bounty of food in this building that they can easily, you know, go through the walls, and so they start...

The, the, the rodent population explodes.

Well, in turn, uh, African wildcats are no dummies and they realize there's all this, these choice yummy rodents right there, and so they are attracted to, uh, to live around the villages.

But the important thing that, that...

Th- that they, th- they might be good to have around outside, but, but at some point, who was it that said, "Well, you know, let's have him live here."