We Finally Know Where Pet Cats Come From – And It’s Not Where We Thought

Domestic cats the world over can trace their ancestry back to North African wildcats that lived around 2,000 years ago. It was from these feral felines that the very first domestic cats were produced, yet their cuteness and companionship were so coveted by humans that within a few decades they had spread to all corners of the Roman Empire.

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Previously, it was thought that cats had been domesticated during Neolithic times in the Levant. Support for this theory came from the discovery of a 7,500-year-old burial in Cyprus containing a human and a cat, while mitochondrial DNA from 6,000-year-old felines in Türkiye indicated that early domestic cats may have spread from Anatolia to Europe alongside early agriculturalists.

However, because the skeletons of domestic cats are identical to those of wildcats, it’s impossible to tell if these prehistoric pussies were part of the same lineage as modern housecats. To find out, researchers analyzed the genomes of 70 ancient cats and 17 wildcats.

They spread very quickly, and in a few decades they were found everywhere within the Roman Empire boundaries.

Marco de Martino

Speaking about the Neolithic Turkish specimens, study author Marco de Martino told IFLScience, “I was sure that I was going to analyze the earliest domestic genomes, but I was totally wrong.”

“Actually, when we look at these genomes, they are not domestic cats – they are European wildcats, which is totally a different species,” he says. In fact, all cats older than 2,000 years turned out to be European wildcats rather than modern domestic cats, which means that the domestication process did not take place in the Neolithic Levant after all.

“Archeological evidence suggests that the first encounter between cats and humans was in the Levant, and we are not rejecting the relationship that happened in the Neolithic,” says study author Claudio Ottoni. “There was definitely a commensal relationship, but that did not ultimately lead to the domestication and dispersal of cats.”

In other words, while people may have lived alongside wildcats during Neolithic times, they didn’t domesticate them. “We had to wait several millennia, until about 2,000 years ago, to start looking at ancient genomes that are not European wildcat genomes,” says de Martino. “Those were actually the earliest domestic cats that we could find.”

Unlike the older Neolithic specimens, these first pets were directly descended from North African wildcats, and it’s this same lineage that can be found in human households across the world today (not to mention all over the internet). The earliest member of this domesticated breed detected by the researchers was about 2,200 years old, yet by the first century BCE these cats had made it to the eastern and northern borders of the Roman Empire, even reaching the British Isles.

“They spread very quickly, and in a few decades they were found everywhere within the Roman Empire boundaries,” says de Martino. As astonishing as that seems, the bigger story here is that cat domestication occurred remarkably recently, and thousands of years later than had previously been suggested.

“We’re moving the introduction [of domestic cats] from eight or nine thousand years ago to only 2,000 years ago, so it's a big difference,” says de Martino. “It's a totally different story.”

The study is published in the journal Science.