The Incredible, Unlikely Story of How Cats Became Our Pets

Both teams faced the same problem in their quest to understand how cats learned to sit on mats, namely the lack of archaeological evidence across time. There are several reasons for this shortcoming: for example, during excavations, bones of animals that people eat are more often found, and cat bones are very small.

This also means that both teams' reconstructions of cat history are speculative and require further research—they are not the definitive history of cats. However, research offers new insight into how these creatures conquered the world.

Peering into the Past

IN Cellular genomics In the paper, the researchers sought to distinguish between domestic cats and Asian wild cats, which, although similar to domestic cats in size, are not at all the same in temperament. (Lyons calls them “nasty little kittens.”)

The scientists found that wild cats had lived alongside humans for about 3,500 years, but despite all that time, they were “a clear example of 'failed domestication,'” said study co-author Luo Shu-Jin, a biologist at the Beijing-Tsinghua Life Sciences Center in China.

“Leopard cats have returned to their natural habitat and today live as our elusive and hidden neighbors,” says Luo.

Instead, the study suggests, domestic cats only flourished in China thanks to the Silk Road, arriving there about 1,400 years ago. It's also possible that climate change led to changes in agriculture and population in the region, which may have affected how much food was available to lurking Asian wild cats, the researchers suggest.

Article published in ScienceRussia, on the contrary, has focused on Europe and North Africa. It is based on previous work this suggested that the ancestors of domestic cats were a mixture of wild cats from the Middle East and North Africa.

For the new study, the researchers analyzed samples of nuclear DNA—an organism's core genome containing contributions from both parents—from the same samples examined in the older study, which did not look at this type of DNA.

Particularly intriguing is a new look at cats that lived in Turkey thousands of years ago. “I was so excited to look at their nuclear genomes for the first time,” says Marco De Martino, a paleogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and co-author of the study.

However, the new analysis showed something radically different from the old work. These Neolithic felines were true wild cats. This discovery, as well as the results of the analysis carried out in China, suggests that the domestication of cats occurred much more slowly than scientists had assumed.

“Cats are a complex species, they are independent,” says Claudio Ottoni, a paleogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and another co-author of the study. Science study. “They didn’t just stay with people—they still went around and mixed with the local feral cats.”

Both discoveries suggest that truly domesticated cats arose much later than previously thought—perhaps as early as 2,000 years ago. If this timeline is correct, it highlights how quickly cats have settled into the human world and how much we have to learn about our feline friends.

“They just open the door a little bit, a hair's breadth, to give us an idea of ​​how they got to where they are,” Lyons says.