Ancient DNA rewrites the origin story of domestic cats

Housecats feel ancient, yet new genetic work shows their European story is surprisingly young. Domestic cats first joined European communities around 2,000 years ago, during the age of Roman power, not in deep prehistory.

Recent estimates compiled by a global dataset put the total cat population above one billion, from pets to feral animals worldwide. 

Against that sheer number, it is striking how late we have finally pinned down when and from where our house companions reached Europe.

A late arrival in Europe

The work was led by Marco De Martino, a paleogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. 

His research focuses on using ancient DNA, DNA recovered from long dead organisms, to track how animals and people moved across continents.

In the new study the team analyzed genetic data from 87 cats, many drawn from archaeological bones across Europe, North Africa, and Anatolia. 

Those genomes reveal that earlier cats from Europe sit genetically with European wildcats rather than with true domestic animals.

Earlier theories had domestic cats trotting into Europe alongside the first Near Eastern farmers. Genetic evidence now places their arrival in a world of cities, armies, and merchant fleets already thriving around the Mediterranean.

To assemble that dataset, the team worked with archaeologists, museum curators, and geneticists spread across many countries. 

Tiny fragments of jaw, leg, and even preserved skin carried enough DNA to connect cats from caves, farms, and coastal towns into a story.

Rethinking early cat stories

Back in 2017, an ancient DNA analysis stitched together cat remains from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. 

That study suggested that early housecats drew ancestry from both the Levant and Egypt.

A later genetics paper surveyed more than one thousand randomly bred cats around Eurasia. The results pointed to the eastern Mediterranean as a cradle of domestication, close to where African wildcats first lived alongside stored grain and rodents.

De Martino and colleagues did not discard that earlier work, but they looked at whole nuclear genomes rather than just short stretches of DNA. 

By adding mitochondrial DNA, genetic material from the cell’s energy makers, into that picture, they showed that many so called early domestic cats in Europe were actually European wildcats.

Across these studies a single wild animal keeps appearing, the African wildcat. Modern domestic cats sit inside that lineage on DNA family trees, which means every tabby traces back to those wary desert stalkers.

What the ancient genomes reveal

The team built what scientists call paleogenomics, genome level study of ancient DNA, by sampling 225 cat bones from 97 archaeological sites stretching from Portugal to central Turkey. 

From that pool they reconstructed 70 ancient and 17 modern genomes, creating a time slice view of cat history over nearly eleven thousand years.

One striking result comes from Sardinia, where a cat from the second century BCE at Genoni clusters tightly with present day wildcats on the island. 

Its DNA also ties it closely to a wildcat from Morocco, hinting that people ferried wild North African cats to a Mediterranean island with no native wildcats.

A different North African population gave rise to the modern European housecat, and its earliest known genome comes from a cat at a Roman fort in Mautern in what is now Austria. 

That individual lived around the turn of the first century, just as imperial roads and supply lines were binding much of Europe to North Africa and the Near East.

Taken together, those patterns point to two human mediated cat movements into the Mediterranean, one with wildcats and a later one with domestic animals. 

The first event left a relic wild population on Sardinia, while the second created the genetic template for the housecats that now dominate Europe.

Why the origin story matters now

“Ever sphinxlike, cats give up their secrets grudgingly,” wrote Jonathan Losos in a short article on the new work.

Losos is an evolutionary biologist at Washington University in St. Louis (WashU), and his remark captures how many puzzles still surround cat domestication.

The new genomic map puts North African wildcats, and not only Levantine or Egyptian populations, at the center of the story for the cats that eventually filled European homes. 

At the same time it reminds researchers that bones, art, and DNA help tell the tale when hybridization, breeding between lineages, blurs the picture.

Conservation biologists are rethinking what counts as a pure wildcat in regions where domestic and wild lineages have overlapped for thousands of years. 

A clearer timeline of contact helps separate deep genetic mixing from recent hybrid bursts driven by habitat loss and spread of roaming pets.

Future work on more cats from North Africa and the Levant, especially from Egypt, should pin down whether there was one cradle of domestication. 

Those patterns show how human travel, trade, and belief rewired ecosystems and left even today’s ordinary tabby with a surprisingly adventurous past.

The study is published in the journal Science.

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