100? How about 150?

https://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk/BTNPointerCats.htm

http://www.19thcenturyphotos.com/Henry-Pointer's-cats-124601...

https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/104XHB

Complete with meme captions.

The jackalope meme is in its nineties. The Kokopelli meme is over a thousand years old and has lately been rehydrated. Venus of Willendorf is around 25k years old. One can play this game for a long time.

Cats are fascinating because the best and the worst people in our lives could be described as cat like.

You know a cool cat. You also know a skittish cat.

Most animal connotations have a singular meaning, but cats, cats refuse to be boxed in.

Even 100 years ago, people were finding ways to share cute cat content — it really underscores how consistent human behavior is despite evolving technologies. Postcards were like early social media is particularly interesting.

The influence of 100-year-old viral memes can still be felt today. We use the terms "foo" and "bar" in programming as standardized nonce words or even variable names; "foo" in particular is traceable at least as far back as the 1930s comic Smokey Stover, whose author Bill Holman was fond of putting nonsensical words, puns, and sight gags in his comics. The main character was a goofy fireman who drove a tiny two-wheeled fire truck actually called the Foomobile. This comic kicked off a sort of foo-mania in popular culture, as exemplified by certain Warner Bros. cartoons, in which for instance Daffy Duck would hold up a sign reading "Silence Is Foo!" "Foo" was related to "phooey" and "faux pas" and carried similar connotations of silliness or stupidity; it would combine with WWII slang "FUBAR" to form "foobar".

I gave up attempting to grok the appeal of "foo" when I realized it was probably just a 1930s dank meme, and "you had to be there" to fully appreciate it. But recently we're seeing this whole process play out again so we can witness, as it happens, the rise of a new nonsense word into popular culture: "skibidi".

I don't know how a UK medium such as the BBC forgot to mention the now well-known Louis Wain (an English artist) [1][2]. I share the same surname with him but am not related. My uncle, an antiquarian, gave me an original postcard from him. Before that, I discovered him in a low-quality encyclopedia at a girlfriend's house, in an entry on schizophrenia [3].

[1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wain

[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10687506/

[3] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Louis-Wain-Pictures-of-c...

Didn't Ancient Egypt basically build a civilization and cult of worship based entirely on cat memes, with a particular monument to prove it?

I don't know why it's near universal. Ancient egypt had them. Japan loves them.

My stupid cat was acting crazy tonight and I was wondering: "How comes you still make me laugh you silly cat?". The thing was, as usual, attacking its rear legs and them legs were fighting back, going for the head.

I just opened the link to another frontpage article "The perils of transition to 64-bit time" and... Sure enough a cat picture greeted me.

I mean... It never gets old.

Linguistic note: neither "meme" (in the modern sense, not the Dawkins sense) nor "going viral" existed 20 years ago, let alone 100 years. The nature of how culture spread makes both words wildly inapplicable, even if the underlying idea is somewhat similar.