How Did Cats Spread Around The World?

Cats. You know them, you love them. Or at least, I do. But whatever you feel about cats, they're a bit of a scientific mystery. No one is totally sure whether the common house cat is really a domestic breed distinct from its wild ancestors. Since the cat genome was first sequenced, albeit incompletely, in 2007, we know all cats can be traced back to the Near Eastern wildcat that still lives in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern countries. Now, a team of geneticists have taken their love of cats to a whole new level. They studied DNA found in the remains of 209 ancient cats that lived between 15,000 years ago and the 18th century. The results give some insight into how cats conquered the world… before the Internet. Right off the bat, the team knew they had something interesting on their hands. They found a 9,500 year old tomb in Cyprus that contained cat remains alongside human remains, and they also found remains in Egyptian tombs from 6,000 years ago -- because those Egyptians were really fond of felines! The researchers expanded their study to include cat remains found in burial sites across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. They focused specifically on mitochondrial DNA. Unlike nuclear DNA that is found in the nucleus of most cells, mitochondrial DNA is found in sub-compartments outside the nucleus. And this type of DNA only contains genetic information passed down from momma. In cats, the team found a mitochondrial lineage between Middle Eastern wild cats and early farming communities in the eastern Mediterranean, so it looks like cats spread pretty easily among early farming communities. The team suspects they were probably drawn by the mice who were in turn drawn to the farms by grain stores, and the humans probably kept them around to manage the rodent population. The same mitochondrial strain was also found linking cats from Egypt between the 4th century BCE and 4th century CE to cats in Bulgaria, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa. So farm-based was one wave of cat expansion. The second was by boat. Again, the mitochondrial DNA connection was found in analyzed cat remains from a Viking site in northern Germany. This suggests cats traveled the world with sailors and Vikings for the same reason farmers kept them around: to help keep rodent populations in check