Let’s forget everything we thought we knew about the origin of domestic cats. Because it turns out that they did not arrive in Europe with Neolithic farmers, but much later, on the ships of Imperial Rome. The discovery was made possible by… … To a comprehensive new analysis of ancient DNA, which has rewritten the history of the most mysterious pet ever known to humanity. The real “cradle” of modern domestic cats was not in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago, but in North Africa 2,000 years ago, much later than we always thought.
Let’s be honest: there’s something about a cat’s appearance that makes us suspect that it knows something we don’t. They watch us from the sofa, or from the top of any piece of furniture, with the indifference of someone who knows he is the absolute owner of our home. However, despite living with them, their origin has been a real and frustrating scientific mystery for decades.
Even today, official history, the one that appears in textbooks and that we take for granted, tells us that cats entered our lives from the first farmers, in the Fertile Crescent, about 10,000 years ago. It certainly has an overwhelming logic: humans invented agriculture, we stored grains, mice arrived, and then wild cats decided to stay and allow themselves to be domesticated in exchange for easy food. It seemed like a perfect equation.
But that story is no longer valid. In fact, a new study, led by researcher Marco De Martino, from the University of Rome Tor Vergata and recently published in the journal Science, has turned this chronology “upside down” by analyzing the genomes of 87 ancient and modern cats. Our cats, which we have at home, are late immigrants who invaded Europe thousands of years later than we thought, and their genetic roots extend deep into North Africa.
A neighbor, not a pet
For years, archaeologists have not stopped finding cat bones in European and Asian sites dating back to the Neolithic period (about 6,000 years ago). And every time they saw a cat bone next to human tools, the conclusion was automatic: Here we have a house cat. A famous burial site was even found in Cyprus, about 9,500 years old, where a human was buried next to a cat. It seemed like definitive proof that domestication occurred at the dawn of our civilization.
However, Di Martino’s team did something that had until now been very technically difficult: sequence nuclear DNA from the bones of these ancient cats. Unlike mitochondrial DNA, which is not found in the cell nucleus, but in the mitochondria, and which only tells us about maternal lineage, nuclear DNA gives us the complete picture of an individual.
Thus, when analyzing these supposed “domestic cats” that lived in Europe and Turkey thousands of years ago, researchers had a big surprise: They were not domestic cats at all, but wild cats, specifically the European wildcat (Felis silvestris silvestris). Those animals were there, yes, and they may have inhabited human settlements or even occasionally intersected with cats from abroad, but genetically they were still wild beasts. That means they weren’t our cats. They were not pets, just neighbors. Or to put it another way, the idea that domestic cats spread across Europe alongside agriculture is, according to this new data, nothing more than a myth.
African origin
So, where does the cat that many of us have at home come from? The study identified North Africa as the real starting point for the domestication of modern cats. Genetic analyzes leave no room for doubt, showing that all current domestic cats are descended from the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), specifically from populations in the north of the continent, and not so much from the Mediterranean Levant variants (area of Israel, Palestine, Lebanon…) as previously thought.
Which changes the map completely. This means that as Neolithic farmers expanded across Europe carrying goats, sheep and wheat, cats were not necessarily part of their baggage. The population explosion of domestic cats, or true “diaspora cats,” occurred thousands of years later.
According to Di Martino’s data, domestic cats themselves do not appear in the fossil record of Europe and southwest Asia until about 2,000 years ago. That is, we are talking about the Classical Age, not the Stone Age. Cats were brought to Europe by merchants, sailors and, above all, by Roman ships.
Roman “highway”.
The Roman Empire connected the known world. His ships laden with grain, cloth, and spices were constantly crossing the Mediterranean from Egypt and North Africa to Rome and the provinces. And in their dark cellars, often filled with food, rats pose a serious threat. the solution? Ship North African cats, the original “killing machines” that evolved perfectly, to protect valuable cargo.
Thus, following the military and trade routes of Rome, the domestic cat (Felis catus) landed in Europe, where it spread rapidly, arriving in Britain around the first century AD. The resulting picture is, of course, a powerful one: the cat did not arrive by slowly “walking” over the centuries, but as a frequent traveler on imperial galleys, and a “biological tool” for sanitation and food protection.
The secret of Cyprus and Sardinia
So what happens to that famous Cyprus cat from 9,500 years ago? Is the previous study wrong? Not necessarily. The discovery is of course real, but the explanation fails. Di Martino and his colleagues suggest that the cat was not a domesticated animal, but rather a tamed wild cat, or perhaps simply captured.
This is where the so-called “Sardinian cat case” comes into play. In fact, the study showed that the wild cats that inhabit that island today (and those that inhabited it in ancient times) are more closely related to the wild cats of North Africa than to modern domestic cats. This means that ancient humans transported wild cats on their ships and then released them on islands where they did not naturally exist.
All of the above forces us to distinguish between two concepts that we often use synonymously: “domestication” and “domestication”. A “tamed” animal is a single wild individual that tolerates humans (such as that of the Cypriot cat). A “domesticated” animal is an entire species that has genetically changed to adapt to living with us. What DNA tells us is that humans have been moving cats from place to place for thousands of years, but true domestication, which turns the beast into a companion that sleeps at the foot of the bed, is a much more recent phenomenon and is located in North Africa.
Egypt’s influence and “genetic chaos”
It is impossible to talk about cats and not look at Egypt. The new study does not in any way exclude the importance of the Nile civilization in the process of domesticating cats. In fact, we know from art and mummies that by 1500 BC (the time of Tuthmosis III), the cat was already a full-fledged member of the Egyptian family, adorned with jewels and eating under its owner’s chair.
New data suggest that Egypt, and North Africa in general, may have served not only as a place of origin but also as a “training school” for domestic cats. In fact, Felis silvestris lybica has improved its behavior there. Although domestic cats are not physically different from their wild ancestors (they have the same brain size and similar intestinal length, unlike dogs, which are radically changed compared to the wolf), there were crucial changes. They became less aggressive, more tolerant of population density and, above all, able to establish strong social bonds.
“Always sphinx-like, cats reveal their secrets reluctantly,” Jonathan Losos wrote in an article published in Perspectives on Science. And he’s right. The study by Di Martino and his team is part of a larger scientific effort, called Project Felix, that seeks to uncover these and other unknowns related to cats. Because it’s strange that even though the cat is the most popular pet in the world, we still know very little about how they look like.
Another revealing fact from the study is the “genetic chaos” that the researchers encountered. Before the true domestic cats of North Africa swept away the competition, there was a lot of hybridization. European wildcats interbred with new arrivals from the East. This explains the error of previous studies, which relied only on mitochondrial DNA. It is possible to have a cat with a “mother” of oriental lineage, but, genetically, she was almost 100% European wildcat. This is something that can only be appreciated if you look at the complete genome, as Di Martino did. Therefore, these hybrids were not the line that gave rise to our cats. They were evolutionary dead ends, or wild populations that intermittently absorbed foreign genes.
Late companion
The conclusion of the study, ultimately, is that the relationship between humans and cats is much more recent than we thought, at least in its full form. Our alliance was forged much later than we thought, perhaps in the warmth of Egyptian homes and in the holds of ships that once plied the Mediterranean.
Perhaps this “youth” of domestic species is an explanation for cats’ proverbial independence. We thought we had shaped its nature from the beginning of our civilization, but the cat, as it was in his form, took his time in “adopting” us. He did not come to us when we began to plow the land. He came when we started building empires and ships, when the world became global enough for him. He did not come to serve us, but to live with us and submit to His laws. After all, anyone who has owned a cat knows that in reality, they have never been fully domesticated. They just agreed to share the couch with us.