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Despite oodles of data on dog domestication, the exact origins of our feline friends have long remained fuzzy. We do know that pet cats retained many of their wild cat ancestors’ characteristics. This—perhaps not surprising many cat caretakers—makes pet cats technically “semidomesticated.” But scientists have squabbled over precisely where and when such changes came about.
The feline timeline is especially tricky to pinpoint due to scarce archeological findings, along with the fact that the bones of wild cats and domesticated ones look quite similar. So far, researchers have encountered tantalizing clues, including depictions of cats as beloved, jewelry-wearing family members in Egypt around 3,500 years ago. But feline domestication might have happened even earlier, according to findings of cat bones from nearly 10,000 years ago in Cyprus. These revelations have suggested that cat domestication first cropped up in the Levant region.
Genetic analysis of ancient and modern cat specimens could offer more clarity, but few studies have taken on this endeavor so far. Recent analyses of ancient DNA hint that cats moved from what’s now Turkey to Europe some 6,000 years ago, coinciding with the dawn of large-scale agriculture. But it has been uncertain whether these kitties were truly domesticated or just a specific lineage of wildcats.
Now, new genetic analysis has offered some clearer insights: Domestic cats may have evolved from North African wildcats, rather than those from the Levant. These feline findings were reported in the journal Science. The authors also suggested that bona fide domesticated felines only arrived in southwest Asia and Europe around 2,000 years ago. Before then, cats that made their way to the region were instead “genetically European wildcats and reflect ancient hybridization rather than early domestication,” according to a statement about the study.
“Our findings challenge the commonly held view of a Neolithic introduction of domestic cats to Europe, instead placing their arrival several millennia later,” the authors wrote in the paper. The findings suggest cats, in their semi-domesticated state, joined humans as companions far later than did dogs.
Read more: “Can a Cat Have an Existential Crisis?”
This conclusion stemmed from analysis of 87 genomes from modern and ancient cats, the majority of which were from archaeological specimens that dated as far back as roughly 9000 B.C. This data encompassed cats from Europe, North Africa, and a region of Turkey called Anatolia.
The new paper comes with limitations, Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who wasn’t involved in the new study, noted in an accompanying commentary in Science. For example, the European timeline proposed in this paper conflicts with depictions of cats found in modern-day Greece and Italy dating back to nearly 4,000 years ago. This contradiction might stem from a gap in genomic cat data between 2,000 to 4,000 years ago.
Today, house cats reside in every continent besides Antarctica, and, including feral felines, may number up to 1 billion. “Ever sphinxlike, cats give up their secrets grudgingly,” Losos wrote. “Yet more ancient DNA is needed to unravel these mysteries of long ago.” 
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Lead image: Roy Egloff / Wikimedia Commons
