Cats Enslaved Humans Later Than Thought

It has long been thought that cats began to bond with humans around 10,000 years ago and that our love affair with felines arose in the same part of the world, the Levant. New research is upending both of those notions.

Science / AAAS

We know that all modern cats are descended from a single species, the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica). Where and when feline domestication took place has been more speculation than established fact, but now the history of cat-human affiliation is coming into focus.

Researchers from the University of Roma Tor Vergata analyzed archeological samples of ancient cats from Europe and Asia Minor to reconstruct entire genomes via DNA sequencing. The findings show that cat domestication did not start in the Levant at the dawn of agriculture, but in northern Africa a few thousand years later. 

“We couldn't find any domestic cats, even in other parts of the European continent, until 2,000 years ago,” paleogeneticist Claudio Ottoni tells ABC News. “So this is a big change in the story.” The north Africa angle probably explains why cats were revered by ancient Egyptians.

A similar reordering of the cat-human chronology is unfolding farther East. There is evidence that cats lived alongside humans in China around 3300 B.C., but these were leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis), and apparently were never domesticated. Rather, these wild animals co-existed with local human settlements but without much interspecies interaction.

Again the researchers deployed genomic analyses, examining feline bones from 14 archaeological sites in China. The oldest truly domesticated kitty was dated to about 700 A.D., and it had migrated to the region via the Silk Road. (If you’re wondering, dogs, useful animals, were domesticated from wolves much earlier, between 30,000 and 40.000 years ago.)

The research on cats in the Middle East, Africa, and Europe is published in the journal Science; the study on cats in ancient China is in Cell Genomics.

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