Scientists Have Finally Discovered Whether Humans Are More Like Cats or Dogs – Vice

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Scientists Have Finally Discovered Whether
Humans Are More Like Cats or Dogs

Scientists say humans are just as related to cats and dogs, but one pet pulls ahead when it comes to how our genes are arranged.

By Ashley Fike, May 12, 2026, 9:23am

It’s an argument that goes back millennia. You’re either a cat person or a dog person, and no amount of reasoning, evidence, or cohabitation is going to change that. Science, however, just threw its weight behind one side, and cat people are going to be completely insufferable about it.

According to a recent Live Science piece, the question of whether humans are more closely related to cats or dogs depends entirely on how you’re measuring. And one answer is going to make cat people unbearable at dinner parties for the foreseeable future.

From a pure evolutionary standpoint, it’s a tie. Cats, dogs, and humans are all mammals, but the family tree branches off quickly. Both cats and dogs fall within the order Carnivora, while humans are primates. Those two groups split from a common ancestor somewhere between 90 and 95 million years ago, according to Mark Springer, professor emeritus of evolution, ecology, and organismal biology at UC Riverside. Your dog and your cat are technically closer relatives to pangolins, cows, and bats than they are to you. 

Scientists Have Finally Settled Whether Humans Are
More Like Cats or Dogs

Genetically, though, cats pull ahead. When scientists look at raw DNA change over time, humans are about equally related to both. But when the comparison shifts to how DNA is actually organized within chromosomes, a gap opens. Dogs have undergone extensive chromosomal rearrangements over evolutionary history. Cats really didn’t, and their genome structure looks considerably more like ours. “In terms of how genes are arranged within chromosomes, humans and cats are twice as similar to each other as humans are to dogs,” William Murphy, a comparative genomicist at Texas A&M University, told Live Science. 

That has major medical implications. Chromosome organization affects how genes get switched on and off, making cats a better research model for understanding human gene regulation than dogs. A recent study found that cancer-related genes in cats closely mirror those in humans in both number and variety. A gene called FBXW7 was mutated in more than half of the feline mammary tumors studied, and in humans, mutations in the same gene are linked to worse breast cancer outcomes. Polycystic kidney disease shows up in both species, too.

Dogs still pull their weight in research, used to study Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and heart disease. But cats have historically been underrepresented, partly because their genome was mapped later, and partly because cats famously do not cooperate with anyone’s agenda. Researchers included.

So genetically speaking, cats win. Which means cat people were right this whole time, and the rest of us have to live with that.

Tagged: ANIMALS cats dogs Life News pets

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