The History of Cats

A big fight has been brewing for years over the history of the domestic cat. One branch asserted that house cats are domesticated version of the North African wildcat (Felis lybica lybica), that they were domesticated in Egypt, and that they spread from there to Europe in Roman times.

But in late years several cat skeletons have been identified in Neolithic sites in Turkey and southeastern Europe, including one on Cyprus dated to 7,500 BC. Another study found that cats from Turkey migrated into Europe with the first farmers.

Now a major genetic study finds that all of those early European and Turkish cats were wild, and that all the house cats in Europe from Roman times onward descend from Egyptian cats.

Which raises interesting questions about the cats found on European Neolithic sites. Presumably they hung around human habitations to eat the rats and mice drawn there to feast on human food stores, and presumably humans tolerated them. So how domesticated were they? Were they like the raccoons that raid my trash, who are not especially afraid of me but are thoroughly wild, or were they tamer? At least one of those Neolithic cats was deliberately buried; was it a wild animal sacrifie, or was someone doing honor to an esteemed friend?

One interesting detail is that some of those Neolithic cats may have had some DNA from Egyptian cats; did that make them a little tamer?

The process of domestication remains one of the mysteries of the human past.