DDespite the wealth of evidence on dog domestication, the exact origins of our feline friends have long remained unclear. We know that domestic cats have retained many of the characteristics of their wild cat ancestors. This—perhaps unsurprisingly to many cat keepers—makes domestic cats technically “semi-domesticated.” But scientists debate exactly where and when these changes occurred.
The chronology of felines is particularly difficult to determine due to the sparse archaeological remains and the fact that the bones of wild and domestic cats look very similar. So far, researchers have encountered tantalizing clues, including images of cats as beloved family members wearing jewelry in Egypt about 3,500 years ago. But the domestication of cats may have occurred even earlier, according to the discovery of cat bones from almost 10,000 years ago in Cyprus. These discoveries suggest that cat domestication first occurred in the Levant region.
Genetic analysis of ancient and modern cat specimens could provide greater clarity, but few studies have addressed this question until now. Recent ancient DNA analyzes hint that cats migrated from what is now Turkey to Europe around 6,000 years ago, coinciding with the dawn of large-scale agriculture. But it's still unclear whether these kittens were truly domesticated or just a special line of wild cats.
Now, a new genetic analysis has provided a clearer picture: Domestic cats may have evolved from the wild cats of North Africa, rather than from cats from the Levant. These cat finds were reported in the magazine Science. The authors also suggested that true domestic cats only arrived in southwest Asia and Europe about 2,000 years ago. Before this, cats introduced to the region were instead “genetically European wildcats and reflected ancient hybridization rather than early domestication,” according to statement about the research.
“Our results challenge the generally accepted view of the introduction of domestic cats into Europe during the Neolithic, instead placing their arrival several millennia later,” the authors write in the paper. The results show that semi-domesticated cats joined humans as companions. much later than dogs.
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This conclusion was made based on an analysis of 87 genomes of modern and ancient cats, most of which were taken from archaeological samples dating back to around 9000 BC. This data covers cats from Europe, North Africa and a region of Turkey called Anatolia.
The new paper has limitations, says Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the new study: marked in the accompanying commentary in Science. For example, the European timeline proposed in this article contradicts images of cats found in modern Greece and Italy that date back almost 4,000 years ago. This discrepancy may be due to a gap in genomic data for cats that existed between 2,000 and 4,000 years ago.
Today, domestic cats live on every continent except Antarctica, and including wild cats, their population may be as high as 1 billion. “Sphynx-like cats are reluctant to give up their secrets,” Losos wrote. “However, more ancient DNA is needed to unravel these long-standing mysteries.”
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Main image: Roy Egloff/Wikimedia Commons
