Ancient people had traveling companion: Cats
NEW YORK — Long before cats became the darlings of Facebook and Youtube, they spread through the ancient human world.
A DNA study reached back thousands of years to track that conquest and found evidence of two major dispersals from the Middle East, in which people evidently took cats with them. Genetic signatures the felines had on those journeys are still seen in most modern-day breeds.
Researchers analyzed DNA from cats as old as 9,000 years from Europe, Africa and Asia, including some Egyptian cat mummies.
The domestication process may have begun around 10,000 years ago when people settled in the Fertile Crescent, the region that includes the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and land around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They stored grain, which drew rodents, which attracted wild cats. Over time, these felines got used to hanging around people.
The new study tracked the spread of specific cat DNA markers over long distances through time, a sign that people had taken cats with them. Results were released Monday by the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Researchers also looked for a genetic variant that produces the blotchy coat pattern typical of modern-day domestic cats. It showed up more often in samples from after 1300, which fits with other evidence that the tabby cat markings became common by the 1700s.
In the DNA samples analyzed, one genetic signature found first in the Asian portion of Turkey showed up more than 6,000 years ago in Bulgaria.