For instance, a mitochondrial line common in Egyptian cats from the fourth century B.C.E. was found in cat DNA collected from samples in Bulgaria, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa from around the same time. "It's not that humans took some cats and put them inside cages".
The genetic analysis - detailed in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution - proved domestic cants descend from Felis silvestris lybica, the African wildcat, a subspecies native to Egypt and the Near East. Farmers in the Near East likely welcomed the presence of the wildcat, as the feline helped keep grain harvests free of rodents.
New genetic analysis suggests cats first became domesticated by farmers in the Near East and ancient Egypt some 10,000 years ago. In the future, it will be increasingly hard to determine the lines that led to any random pet cat, but for now it's finally somewhat clear.
An ancient exodus of cats from both Turkey and Egypt may have given us the modern cat.
And they underwent another dramatic transformation: A separate analysis of the genes for coat color showed that the coat pattern of cats-which had gone unchanged from the striped sandy appearance of its wildcat ancestors for thousands of years-began to vary, with a blotched tabby look appearing around the 14th century C.E. Dogs and horses changed coat patterns much earlier in their domestication, suggesting that when it came to cats, people were more interested in how they acted than in how they looked.
Then the researchers started to see weird data points, like an Egyptian cat at a Viking sea port during the Middle Ages, and Asian cats at a Roman Red Sea port during the height of the Roman Empire.
Today, there are many breeds of cats with different markings and coats.
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"This can be taken as indication that they were translocated by humans, either by ship or on the ground", probably following ancient trade routes.
"The cat's worldwide conquest began during the Neolithic period", the study authors wrote. The adoption of cats happened many millennia after canines, with earliest evidence of dog domestication dating to 33,000 years ago.
Today, cats live on all continents except Antarctica.
Cats at this time were spread in part by mariners, who valued cats for their ability to eat mice, major pests of ships.
"This is probably how the first encounter between humans and cats occurred", said Claudio Ottoni, study coauthor, via National Geographic. In 2008, archaeozoologist Wim Van Neer of the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels unearthed the remains of six cats-a male, a female, and four kittens-that appear to have been cared for by people almost 6000 years ago. The study also reveals where tabby cats and their blotched fur originated, though researchers argue ancient peoples started the practice of keeping felines for practical reasons - hunting vermin - rather than aesthetic ones. At that moment, cats became more like other domestic animals. It seems that, because cats are so independent, territorial and, at times, downright antisocial, they were not so easy to domesticate as the co-operative, pack-orientated wolf. Geigl said she'd like to do additional work to determine how black cats, which Egyptian iconography depicted, came about.
In the meantime, Van Neer still hopes to find out whether the Egyptians independently domesticated cats.
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