Japanese literary figure Natsume Soseki (1867–1916) began his 1905 novel "I Am a Cat" with the line, "I am a cat. As yet I have no name. I have no idea where I was born." As that suggests, it is still unclear where cats came from and when they began living with humans.
Even as cats eat the food humans give them, they still keep their distance and insist on living their own lives, perhaps because the period when cats were domesticated was shorter than we think and they remain somewhat aloof. Until now, it was believed that cats were domesticated in the Middle East 10,000 years ago as agriculture developed and people sought to control rats, but a new study has found that house cats (Felis catus) emerged much later than that.
A team led by Claudio Ottoni, a paleogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, said on the 28th in the journal Science that "decoding the genes of ancient and modern cats shows that house cats arrived in Europe much more recently than previously thought, about 2,000 years ago, and that it was not due to the spread of Middle Eastern agricultural culture as has been known."
◇House cats appeared only 2,000 years ago
This study is the result of Felix, an international collaborative project supported by the European Research Council (ERC) to trace the origins of cats. The researchers extracted and decoded DNA from 70 cat genomes found at ancient sites dating from 9000 B.C. to the 19th century and from 17 genomes in specimens of modern wildcats housed in museums in Europe, North Africa, and Anatolia (Türkiye), and compared them.
Genetic analysis showed that today's house cats derive from the North African wildcat (Felis lybica lybica). The timing was also long after the rise of Neolithic agricultural culture—about 2,000 years ago. Cats found at earlier ancient sites turned out to be European wildcats (Felis silvestris).
In 2008, researchers at the University of California, Davis analyzed the DNA of 1,100 cats kept in 15 countries and reported that house cats began to be domesticated in the Middle East 10,000 years ago. The proposed emergence route was as follows. When agriculture began in the Middle East 10,000 years ago, rats swarmed to the grain. African wildcats came to human society in search of rats. But unlike dogs, they did not subsist on food from people; they solved their diet by hunting rats themselves. Perhaps for that reason, cats were less dependent on humans than dogs.
The scenario revealed by this study was different. House cats appeared about 2,000 years ago, thousands of years after the advent of Neolithic agricultural culture, as wildcats from North Africa migrated to Europe and the Middle East. Just before house cats emerged, wildcat remains from the island of Sardinia west of Italy were found to be closer to North African wildcats than to house cats. This means humans brought African wildcats to Sardinia, where there had been no cats.
Taken together, the DNA analyses indicate that North African wildcats followed people from Africa to Europe and became house cats, then spread across Europe along the routes of Roman military movement. By the 1st century A.D., house cats had reached Britain, the researchers said.
◇Gaps between archaeological sites and remains
Cats, along with dogs, are the companion animals closest to humans, but their starting points were entirely different. Dogs are thought to have descended from wolves that followed hunters and scavenged food about 40,000 years ago. Because they have lived with humans for a long time, there are many remains from which to analyze DNA, and the genetic differences between wolves and dogs are large, making them easy to distinguish. For example, dogs have more developed genes related to memory. That was necessary to understand human speech.
By contrast, cats have lived with humans for a shorter time than dogs, so there are fewer ancient remains. The oldest cat remains were found in 2004 on Cyprus, an island nation south of Türkiye. In a 9,500-year-old grave, human and cat remains were found together. The Cyprus remains were thought to be evidence that cats were domesticated 10,000 years ago, but the researchers in this study said the Cyprus cat was likely not the first house cat but a European wildcat.
Jonathan Losos, a professor of biology at Washington University in the U.S., said in a commentary published the same day in Science that "this broad decoding of ancient cat DNA suggests that the origin of house cats is North Africa and that wildcats there moved into Europe and Western Asia over the past several thousand years," while also noting that "archaeological sites show that it can be explained differently."
Indeed, in Greece and Italy, relics depicting cats date back 3,700 years. Egyptian wall paintings from 3,500 years ago show that house cats were kept as companion animals. When cats died, they were made into mummies, and the goddess with a cat's head, Bastet, was also worshipped. At the time, cats also traveled with humans by ship.
Losos said, "The mismatch between archaeological sites and genetic analyses may be due to a lack of genomic data for ancient cats from 2,000 to 4,000 years ago." Not only are there few remains from which to decode DNA, but the genes that changed as cats lived with humans are only about one-third of those in dogs. That means there are limits to distinguishing wildcats from house cats.
The sphinx, with a human head on a lion (cat) body, posed riddles and tested humans. In his commentary, Losos said, "Like the Sphinx, cats reluctantly reveal their secrets," adding, "To solve the ancient riddle, we need more ancient DNA." If more ancient cat remains are found and new domestication-related genetic variants are identified, the timing and pathway for the emergence of house cats could change again. Cats are, after all, mysterious beings.
References
Science (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adt2642
PNAS (2014), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1410083111
Genomics (2008), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ygeno.2007.10.009
Science (2004), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1139518
Science (2004), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1095335