Domestic cats did not pad into Europe alongside the continent’s first farmers, as many researchers had assumed, according to a new ancient DNA study that argues the familiar house cat is a relative latecomer, carried from North Africa into Europe only 2,000 years ago through Mediterranean trade and political expansion.
“We couldn’t find any domestic cats, even in other parts of the European continent, until 2,000 years ago,” study co-author and paleogeneticist Claudio Ottoni told ABC News. “So this is a big change in the story.”
For years, the dominant hypothesis placed cat domestication in the Neolithic Near East, with early farmers tolerating and then favoring wildcats that hunted rodents in grain stores. Mitochondrial DNA lineages seemed to support a Levantine origin, and archaeologists proposed that cats seemingly moved into Europe with the spread of agriculture.
The new study, led by an international team of geneticists and zooarchaeologists, challenges that view by shifting the focus from mitochondrial lineages to whole genomes across a deep time series.
The researchers sequenced 70 low‑coverage genomes from ancient cat bones excavated at 97 archaeological sites across Europe and Anatolia, spanning from the 9th millennium BCE to the 19th century CE. They combined these with 17 genomes from modern and museum wildcats in Italy, Bulgaria, and North Africa, and with previously published data, to reconstruct relationships among African wildcats, European wildcats, and domestic cats. In effect, their research tracked how and where different cat lineages evolved and how they moved through time and geography.
One of the clearest signals in the dataset is that modern domestic cats cluster genetically with African wildcats rather than with wildcats from the Levant. The present-day house cat, lazily sleeping on your couch yet plotting your demise, shares more genetic drift with a Tunisian wildcat than with Levantine wildcats in the sample, pointing to a North African origin for the domestic lineage represented in Europe today.
For fans of feline history, a big question remains regarding Ancient Egypt’s role in all this.
The ancient civilization has long been cast as the heartland of cat domestication primarily due to all the records, art, and mummies. Oddly, the new genome study cannot yet single it out as the definitive cradle of today’s house cats because crucial DNA evidence is still missing. Since modern domestic cats are genetically closest to an African wildcat from Tunisia, this points to a broad North African origin.
With only wildcat genomes from North Africa and the Levant, and no genomes originating directly from Ancient Egypt itself, the team can’t distinguish whether cat domestication began in the Nile Valley or if it was simply a node in a broader domestication history.
The study also untangles a long‑standing confusion created by mitochondrial DNA. Earlier work had shown a “domestic‑like” mtDNA haplogroup in Neolithic cats from Anatolia and southeast Europe, feeding the idea that domestic cats accompanied early farmers into Europe. By sequencing whole genomes from those same regions and periods, the authors show that all cats from the 9th millennium to the 3rd century BCE fall squarely within the nuclear genetic cluster of European wildcats, even when their mitochondria look Near Eastern. In other words, those were wild European cats carrying imported mtDNA from ancient hybridization, not early pets spreading with agriculture.
This new picture that emerges is of at least two separate human‑mediated movements of African wildcats into the central Mediterranean and Europe.
The first wave brought wildcats from northwest Africa to Sardinia sometime in the second half of the first millennium BCE, as evidenced by a 2nd‑century BCE Sardinian cat that clusters tightly with modern Sardinian and Moroccan wildcats. This lineage appears to have remained largely distinct from later domestic cats, giving rise to the island’s present‑day wildcat population rather than to household pets.
A second, later wave seeded the gene pool of modern domestic cats. All other ancient cats in Europe and Anatolia that show African wildcat–like nuclear ancestry date from the 1st century CE onward and group with today’s domestic cats. The earliest of these domestic‑like genomes comes from a site in Austria dated to roughly the turn of the era, and soon similar cats appear in Italy and along Roman military sites on the Danube frontier, with a parallel appearance in early Imperial Britain. The pattern matches historical hints that Roman armies, merchants, and sailors moved cats around as valued pest controllers on ships, in granaries, and in urban settlements.
Genetic evidence shows that long before cats were tamed, European wildcats in places like Anatolia and the Balkans had already mixed with African wildcats. After people brought true house cats into Europe, the mixing mostly flipped direction: Roman‑era pets had very little wildcat in them, but by the Middle Ages, house cats in many regions carried as much as 15 percent European wildcat ancestry.
This timeline fits. As forests were cleared and farms spread out during this period, the new landscape broke down the natural separation between wild and domestic cats, making cross‑breeding more common as human activity intensified.
The authors point out that a key data set, Ancient Egyptian feline genomes, is still needed to understand the history of cats; their study forces a major revision.
“Our results offer a new interpretive framework for the geographic origin of domestic cats, suggesting a broader and more complex process of domestication that may have involved multiple regions and cultures in North Africa,” the study authors conclude. “Efforts should continue to narrow down the original source population(s) of present-day domestic cats and to clarify the cultural and socioeconomic processes that led to their domestication and promoted their global dispersal.”
The European four-legged fur baby that tries to sit on your laptop keyboard while you work traces back to a complex domestication and dispersal process rooted somewhere in North Africa, and has a noble lineage spread by Mediterranean civilizations of the first millennium BCE.
MJ Banias covers space, security, and technology (also cats) with The Debrief. You can email him at mj@thedebrief.org or follow him on Twitter @mjbanias.