The Incredible, Unlikely Story of How Cats Became Our Pets

Both teams faced the same challenge in their quest to understand how cats came to sit on mats—namely, a paucity of archaeologic evidence through time. There are several reasons for this lack: for instance, bones from animals that humans eat are more likely to be found during excavations, and cat bones are very small.

This also means that both teams’ reconstructions of feline history are hypothetical and require further investigation—they are not the definitive story of cats. Still, the studies do offer new insights into how these creatures conquered the world.

Pawing into the Past

In the Cell Genomics paper, the researchers sought to distinguish between domesticated cats and Asian wildcats, which, while similar to domesticated cats in size, are absolutely not the same in temperament. (Lyons calls them “nasty little kitties.”)

The scientists found that the wildcats lived alongside humans for some 3,500 years—but despite all that time, they were a “clear example of a ‘failed domestication,’” says study co-author Luo Shu-Jin, a biologist at Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences in China.

“Leopard cats returned to their natural habitats, living today as our elusive and hidden neighbors,” Luo says.

Instead, the study suggests, domesticated cats flourished in China only by following the Silk Road, arriving there around 1,400 years ago. It’s also possible that climate change led to agricultural and population shifts in the region, possibly affecting how much food was available to the lurking Asian wildcats, the researchers suggest.

The paper published in Science, by contrast, focused on Europe and North Africa. It builds on previous work that had suggested the ancestors of domestic cats were a blend of Near Eastern and North African wildcats.

For the new research, the scientists analyzed samples of nuclear DNA—the main genome of an organism, containing both parents’ contributions—from the same specimens that were examined in the older study, which had not looked at this type of DNA.

Particularly intriguing was taking a new look at ccats that lived in Turkey thousands of years ago. “I was so excited to have a look at their nuclear genomes for the first time,” says Marco De Martino, a paleogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and co-author of the study.

Yet the new analysis suggested something dramatically different to the older work. These Neolithic felines were pure wildcat. The finding, similarly to the results of the analysis done in China, suggests that cat domestication unfolded much more slowly than scientists had thought.

“The cat is a complex species; they are independent,” says Claudio Ottoni, a paleogeneticist at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and another co-author of the Science study. “They were not just staying with humans—they would still go around and mix with local wildcats.”

Both findings suggest truly domesticated cats arose far later than previously believed—perhaps as late as 2,000 years ago. If that timeline is correct, it underscores just how rapidly cats have settled into the human world—and how much we have to learn about our feline friends.

“They’re just peeping the door open just a little bit at a time, just a whisker’s length, to give us ideas of how they got where they are,” Lyons says.