Cat Gap

https://lovedeathrobots.fandom.com/wiki/Three_Robots#:~:text...

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.

If you store grain in a granary, it attracts a lot of insects, rodents, etc. Cats that could tolerate getting close to human settlements found a good food source. And humans like this, because the cats protect the grain without eating it. So you can see why ancient agrarian societies like the Egyptians held cats in high esteem.

And despite only having a few thousand years to adapt to each other, ends up cats and humans can understand each other and form emotional bonds pretty easily.

I imagine we'll see cats on spaceships of the future just like they were the norm on ships in the age of sail.

    import requests
    import pandas as pd
    from io import BytesIO
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    
    data = []
    for family in ["felidae", "nimravidae"]:
        r = requests.get("https://paleobiodb.org/data1.2/occs/list.csv", params={"base_name": family, "taxon_reso": "family", "cc": "NOA"})
        d = pd.read_csv(BytesIO(r.content)).assign(family=family)
        data.append(d)
    
    data = pd.concat(data, axis=0)
    data["mega_years"] = data[["max_ma", "min_ma"]].mean(axis=1).round().astype(int)
    
    count = data.groupby(["mega_years", "family"]).size().unstack("family")
    count = count.reindex([i for i in range(count.index.max()+1)]).fillna(0.)
    count.index = -count.index
    count = count.sort_index()
    
    fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8,4))
    count.cumsum().plot(ax=ax)
    
    ax.set_yscale("log")
    ax.axvline(-25, linestyle='--', c='k', lw=0.5)
    ax.axvline(-18.5, linestyle='--', c='k', lw=0.5)
    ax.set_title("Cat Gap")

But my point was that their immediate ancestor (and practically still the same species – they easily interbreed) the African wildcat is not similarly gregarious.

Cats are very communicative, which suggests they're strongly social, in the broadest sense.