Where did house cats come from? Ancient DNA shakes up their origin story

By Katie Hunt, CNN

(CNN) — The origins of domestic cats — centuries before they conquered the world’s sofas and internet memes — have long been murky. Now, ancient DNA is helping to fill in the blanks, and the findings shake up the traditional story.

Archaeologists had thought that cats and humans began living with one another around 9,500 years ago in the Levant, which today includes parts of the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean, at the beginning of the Neolithic era when humans started growing crops.

Stores of grain attracted rodents, which in turn enticed wildcats, and humans found it useful to keep those mouse catchers around, leading to the cats’ eventual domestication. The oldest known cat remains in the archaeological record date from a burial in Cyprus from that time period.

However, new analysis of genetic information recovered from cat skeletal remains at archaeological sites across Europe, the Middle East and Asia suggests that the domestic cats familiar today have far more recent origins and were not the first felines to live alongside humans.

“We started to interrogate the bones that are ascribed to domestic cats that go back to 10,000 years and find which actually have the same genomes as the modern cat population that now dominates,” said Greger Larson, a professor in the school of archaeology at England’s University of Oxford. Larson coauthored two papers resulting from the research that published Thursday.

“It then completely undermines that narrative,” Larson said.

A Europe-focused study published in the journal Science examined 87 ancient and modern cat genomes and found that the domestic cat, which has the scientific name Felis catus, originated in North Africa, rather than the Levant as previously thought. Its ancestors were closely related to the African wildcat, or Felis lybica lybica.

The cats established the gene pool of the modern domestic cat and appeared to spread around Europe with the rise of the Roman Empire about 2,000 years ago, the study noted.

By the year 730, the domestic cat had arrived in China, likely hitching a ride in trading caravans along the Silk Road, according to a second study published in the journal Cell Genomics. It analyzed DNA from 22 felid bones unearthed in China over the past 5,000 years.

Before then, an entirely different species of feline unrelated to the domestic cat or its ancestor lived alongside humans from at least 5,400 years ago until AD 150, the researchers discovered. Known scientifically as Prionailurus bengalensis, or the leopard cat, its remains — found previously at seven archaeological sites in China — were identified in the new analysis.

Hidden neighbors

Native to Asia, Prionailurus bengalensis is a small wildcat that does not naturally interbreed with Felis species. But beginning in the 1980s, modern cat breeders interbred the two to produce the Bengal cat, according to the study.

The leopard cat’s relationship with humans was historically “commensal” — the two benefited from one another — but it never became fully domesticated despite living alongside people for more than 3,500 years, said Shu-jin Luo, a senior author of the China-focused study and a researcher at Peking University’s School of Life Sciences in Beijing. People benefited from the wild felines’ mouse-catching skills, while the cats had a ready supply of rodents to eat — but there was likely never any deliberate control over the leopard cat population.

“The human-leopard cat commensal relationship eventually ended, and leopard cats returned to their natural habitats, living today as our elusive and hidden neighbors,” Luo said.

One hypothesis for why the leopard cat never ended up fully domesticated stems from its reputation for preying on chickens as well as rodents, unlike domestic cats that are better at catching mice. In Chinese folklore, the leopard cat is known as the “chicken-catching tiger,” a reference to its appetite for poultry, Luo explained.

“After the Han Dynasty, the rise and change in poultry farming practices — from free ranging to cage-based systems — likely escalated human–leopard cat conflict,” Luo said via email. “Their strong tendency to prey on chickens, and to overkill in confined spaces, would have made leopard cats increasingly unwelcome around human settlements.”

The disappearance of leopard cats from human settlements coincided with the turbulent centuries between the fall of China’s Han dynasty in AD 220 and the rise of the Tang dynasty in AD 618, when a colder, drier period reduced agricultural output, disrupting the leopard cat’s niche, Luo said.

“This does not imply that leopard cats went extinct; rather, they simply retreated from human settlements and continued to persist in their natural forest habitats,” she added.

The new environments that emerged in agricultural communities such as China meant changing relationships with lots of different animals, including wildcats, said William Taylor, assistant professor and curator of archaeology at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, who studies the domestication of animals. He wasn’t involved in the research.

“I think it’s very cool to see these DNA studies help trace how the story of cats of Europe and Asia — this ubiquitous little critter that many folks take for granted — takes us back to the first trade routes like the Silk Roads that were built on travel by animals like horse, donkey, and camel.”

Cats and ancient Egypt

The new findings that trace the origins of the domestic cat to North Africa are perhaps not surprising, said Jonathan Losos, a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis.

Cats play an important role in the iconography of ancient Egypt, he noted in a commentary published alongside the Science study. Tomb walls depict cats as family members wearing collars, earrings and necklaces; eating from dishes; and sitting under chairs.

However, it isn’t clear whether the land of the pharaohs was where the entire domestication process occurred, or if it was simply the finishing school where mice catchers became household companions, Losos wrote.

The Europe-focused study found that the cats at archaeological sites earlier than 200 BC were genetically identifiable as European wildcats of the species Felis silvestris, not domestic cats, even though their skeletons were difficult to tell apart. It is still possible that the wildcats lived among humans, Losos noted, as kittens of wildcat species can be relatively easily tamed.

The work to untangle the history of cats is ongoing, and Losos noted a lack of archaeological samples from North Africa and southwest Asia means the domestic cat’s origin story is far from complete.

“Ever sphinx-like, cats give up their secrets grudgingly,” he added. “Yet more ancient DNA is needed to unravel these mysteries of long ago.”

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