In true feline style, cats took their time deciding when and where to bond with humans.
According to new scientific evidence, the transition from wild hunter to pampered pet occurred much more recently than previously believed, and in a different location.
A study of bones found at archaeological sites suggests that cats began their close relationship with humans only a few thousand years ago, and in North Africa, not the Levant.
“They are ubiquitous, we make TV shows about them and they dominate the internet,” said Professor Greger Larson of the University of Oxford.
“The relationship we have now with cats began about 3,500 or 4,000 years ago, instead of 10,000 years ago.”
New evidence
All modern cats descend from the same species: the African wildcat.
How, where and when they lost their wild character and developed close ties with humans has long intrigued scientists.
To solve the mystery, researchers analyzed DNA from cat bones found at archaeological sites in Europe, North Africa and Anatolia.
Scientists dated the bones, analyzed the DNA and compared it to genetic records from modern cats.
The new evidence shows that the domestication of cats did not begin in the early days of agriculture, in the Levant. It happened, instead, a few millennia later, somewhere in North Africa.
“Rather than occurring in the area where people were initially settling with agriculture, it seems to be a much more Egyptian phenomenon,” Professor Larson said.
This fits with what we know of the land of the pharaohs as a society that revered cats, immortalizing them in art and preserving them as mummies.
Once cats became associated with people, they were transported around the world and were prized on ships as pest controllers.
Cats arrived in Europe about 2,000 years ago, much later than previously thought.
They traveled through Europe and arrived in the United Kingdom with the Romans, and then began moving east along the Silk Road to China.
Today they are found all over the world, except Antarctica.
leopard cats
And in an unexpected twist, scientists discovered that a wild cat lived for a time with people in China, long before domestic cats appeared.
They were leopard cats, small wild cats with spots similar to those of leopards, who lived in human settlements in China for about 3,500 years.
The early relationship between humans and leopard cats was essentially “commensal,” in which two species coexist without causing harm to each other, explained Professor Shu-Jin Luo of Peking University.
“Leopard cats benefited from living near people, while humans were largely unaffected or even welcomed them as natural rodent controllers,” he added.
Leopard cats were not domesticated and continue to live in the wild in Asia.
Interestingly, leopard cats have been crossed with domestic cats to give rise to Bengal cats, which were recognized as a new breed in the 1980s.
The research was published in the journal Science and in Cell Genomics.
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The post New study reveals when and how cats were domesticated appeared first on Veritas News.
