Cats ‘charmed’ ancient humans

Lybica ‘forefather’

PARIS, June 19, (AFP): Long before they conquered ancient Egypt, cats seduced Stone Age farmers who launched the worldwide feline takeover of human homes and hearts, a DNA study showed Monday.

The first wildcat to travel abroad, and the forefather of domestic cats today, was Felis silvestris lybica — a small, striped Middle-Eastern subspecies that went on to colonise the entire world, the research revealed.

It likely travelled to Europe by ship from the region of Anatolia around modernday Turkey, some 6,000 years ago.

“The cat’s worldwide conquest began during the Neolithic period,” the study authors wrote.

The Neolithic was the closing chapter of the Stone Age — a time when prehistoric humans, huntergatherer nomads until then, first tried their hand at cultivating crops and building permanent villages.

With farming came harvestmunching rats, which in turn attracted cats.

“For ancient societies barn cats, village cats and ships’ cats provided critical protection against vermin, especially rodent pests responsible for economic loss and disease,” the researchers wrote in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

The team analysed the DNA of 230 buried and mummified ancient cats in a bid to settle the debate over who was responsible for turning the wild feline into the cuddly couchslouchers we know today.

Obvious

Based on their obvious reverence for the feline — immortalised in statues, paintings and even mummified carcasses — the ancient Egyptians were thought by many to have been the first cat tamers several centuries BC. But others have pointed to a cat skeleton found in a child’s tomb in Cyprus from 7,500 BC, as proof that ancients from the Fertile Crescent beat the Egyptians to it.

The DNA trawl shows we can thank both.

F. s. lybica, the researchers found, “started to spread at times when the first farmers started to migrate into Europe” around 4,400 BC, study coauthor Eva-Maria Geigl of France’s CNRS research institute told AFP.

“This can be taken as indication that they were translocated by humans, either by ship or on the ground”, probably following ancient trade routes.

A few thousand years later, in the time of the pharaohs, an Egyptian variant of lybica also spread in a second wave into Europe and beyond, sparking somewhat of a “craze”, the study authors said in a statement.

“This fad for Egyptian cats very quickly spread through the ancient Greek and Roman world and even much further afield”.

Given that it would have looked a lot like its close cousin from Anatolia, the researchers speculate that the Egyptian cat’s success was likely driven by its personality — “changes in its sociability and tameness”.

Wildcats are solitary, territorial hunters with no hierarchical social structure — seemingly poor candidates for domestication.

Yet today, there are an estimated 500 million domestic cats in the world — one for every dozen or so people.

The ancestor, F. s. lybica, is one of five wildcat sub-species still found in nature today. It lives in North Africa and around the Arabian peninsula.

Global

Geigl

Over millennia, domesticated cats interbred with other wildcat subspecies — including European — that they encountered on their global conquest.

As a result, many European wildcats also have a bit of domestic cat, with lybica origins, in their genome today.

The study revealed that unlike for dogs or horses, humans did not breed cats for their looks — at least for the first few thousand years.

Even to this day, domestic cats closely resemble their wild cousins in terms of body build, function and behaviour.

Dogs, by comparison, range in breed from a Rottweiler to a Chihuahua — neither of which reminds one of their wolf forefather.

When it started, selective breeding targeted mainly the cat’s coat. The first time that a tabby colouring enters the gene record is during the Middle Ages, between the years 500 and 1300, the researchers found.

The spotted or blotched tabby pattern common in housecats today, does not exist in wildcats, which are all striped.

“Only recently, during the 19th century, there were breeding programmes to obtain ‘fancy breeds’,” said Geigl, adding even these are “not very different from the wildcat.”