The cat is one of the animals most chosen for companionship in homes around the world, and its popularity among humans even extends to social networks. But where does human sympathy for this feline come from ? Who first domesticated cats?
The answer is found in the fossil remains of bones, teeth, skin and hair of more than 200 cats found at archaeological sites in the Near East, Africa and Europe . These remains were between 100 and 9,000 years old , and suggest that the first cats to live with humans are descended from the African wild cat or Felis silvestris lybica , a wild subspecies found in North Africa and the Near East. According to the analysis of the genetic code of the remains, all the skeletons found are exactly the same as those of our domestic cat.
The conclusion reached by the study, carried out by scientists at the University of Leuven, in the United Kingdom, is that wildcats were attracted to the first human agricultural settlements, probably because of their abundance of rodents. For their part, the farmers welcomed the wildcats because they kept the cereal grain stocks free of vermin. Over time, man and animal grew closer together, and selection based on behavior eventually led to the domestication of the bobcat.
At a later stage, cats also spread throughout Europe and elsewhere through the commercial center of Egypt. Thus, the cats traveled to large parts of Southwest Asia, Africa, and Europe. Even cat bones with an Egyptian signature have been found in places near the Baltic Sea.
However, “it is not yet clear whether the Egyptian domestic cat is descended from imported Near Eastern cats or whether a second domestication took place in Egypt,” according to one of the study’s co-authors, Claudio Ottoni.
Additionally, research has shed light on what was the most common appearance of cats in Ancient Egypt. They found that the striped cat was much more common , as can be seen in Egyptian mural illustrations. Spotted cats , on the other hand, were not common until the Middle Ages.
