The avatars of the wild Felis catus species – even its own nature as a domestic animal – are a hotly debated issue in the scientific community. The archaeological remains indicate that it already accompanied the human being 9,500 years ago, in the middle of the Neolithic , and the Egyptians turned it into a pet at least 6,000 years ago.
Now, the team led by geneticist Eva-Maria Geigl, from the Jacques Monod Institute, in Paris, has sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of 209 cat remains from more than thirty sites in Europe, the Middle East and Africa and that were born between ago. 15,000 and 200 years. The objective was to shed some more light on the history of this animal in the company of humans.
According to the conclusions of the work, presented on the occasion of a congress held in Oxford (England), the cats probably spread around the world in two waves. The first took place alongside the first farming communities in the eastern Mediterranean : domesticated cats probably kept rodents attracted to the harvested grain at bay.
Thousands years later, Egyptian kittens spread across Eurasia and Africa , since the characteristic mitochondrial DNA of mummified cats between the 4th century BC and the 4th century AD has been detected in contemporary specimens from Bulgaria, Turkey and Africa. sub-Saharan.
Another great discovery by Geigl’s team has been to identify genetic material from the same lineage in medieval Viking sites in northern Germany, dated between the 8th and 11th centuries: until now, it was not known that this town had had cats. Experts believe they were carried on their boats also to protect food from rats .
Photo: mummified cats in the Louvre.
