We finally know where domestic cats come from – and it’s not where we thought. Internet stars have only existed for two millennia, and are directly descended from North African wildcats.
After all, domestic cats around the world have their remote origins in wild cats from North Africawho lived about 2,000 years ago.
It was from these wild felines that the first domestic catsbut their tenderness and company were so desired by humans that, within a few decades, they spread to every corner of the Roman Empire.
Until now, it was thought that the domestication of cats occurred during the Neolithic, in the Levant.
This theory was supported by the discovery of a 7,500-year-old burial in Cyprus, where a human and a cat were found, as well as 6,000-year-old feline mitochondrial DNA in present-day Turkey, which suggested that the first domestic cats would have accompanied the first farmers from Anatolia to Europe.
However, as the skeletons of domestic cats are identical to those of wild cats, it is impossible to distinguish whether these prehistoric felines belonged to the same lineage as modern-day domestic cats.
To clarify this issue, a team of researchers analyzed, in a new whose results were published on Thursday in the journal Scienceos genomes of 70 ancient cats and 17 wild cats.
“When we analyzed the specimens from Neolithic of TürkiyeI was sure that I was going to analyze the first genomes of domestic cats, but I was completely wrong”, he says Marco de Martinoco-author of the study, at .
“In fact, we realized that they are not domestic cats – are European wild cats, which constitute a totally different species”, explains the researcher.
In fact, all cats over 2,000 years turned out to be European wildcats, and not modern domestic catswhich means that the domestication process did not take place in the Neolithic Rising.
“Archaeological evidence suggests that the first contact between cats and humans occurred in the Levant, and We are not rejecting this relationship that happened in the Neolithic”, says Claudio Ottonialso co-author of the study.
“There was, without a doubt, a commensal relationshipbut this did not ultimately lead to the domestication and dispersal of cats”, details Ottoni.
In other words, although people may have lived with wild cats during the Neolithic, didn’t manage to domesticate them.
“We had to wait several millenniauntil about 2,000 years ago, to start finding ancient genomes that were not from European wildcats”, says de Martino. “These were in fact the first domestic cats that we managed to identify.”
Unlike Neolithic specimens, these early pets descended directly from the wild cats of North Africaand it is precisely this lineage that can be found today in homes all over the world (and, of course, everywhere on the internet).
O oldest member of this domestic lineage identified by researchers is about 2,200 years oldbut by the 1st century BC these cats had reached the eastern and northern borders of the Roman Empire, including the British Isles.
“They spread quicklyand within a few decades they were present throughout the entire territory of the Roman Empire”, says de Martino. As surprising as it may seem, the most notable thing about this discovery is that the domestication of cats happened relatively recently, thousands of years later than previously thought.
“We are rolling back the introduction of domestic cats eight or nine thousand years old to just two thousand years agowhich is a huge difference,” de Martino points out. “It’s a totally different story.”
