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 209 ancient cats as old as 9,000 years from Europe, Africa and Asia, including some ancient Egyptian cat mummies.
"They are direct witnesses of the situation in the past," said Eva-Maria Geigl of the Jacques Monod Institute in Paris. She and colleagues also looked at 28 modern feral cats from Bulgaria and east Africa.
The domestication process may have begun around 10,000 years ago when people settled in the Fertile Crescent, the arch-shaped 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 in turn attracted wild cats. Animal remains in trash heaps might have attracted them too. Over time, these wild felines adapted to this man-made environment and got used to hanging around people.
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Cats were clearly tame by about 3,500 years ago in Egypt, where paintings often placed them beneath chairs. That shows by that time, "the cat makes its way to the household," said Geigl.
But the overall domestication process has been hard for scientists to track, in part because fossils skeletons don't reveal whether a cat was wild or domesticated.
The study "strengthens and refines previous work," said Carlos Driscoll of the Wildlife Institute of India. The extensive sampling of cat DNA going back so far in time is unprecedented, he said.
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