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 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.
It’s the latest glimpse into the complicated story of domesticated cats. They are descendants of wild ancestors that learned to live with people and became relatively tame — though some cat owners would say that nowadays, they don’t always seem enthusiastic about our company.
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.
A previous study had found a cat buried alongside a human some 9,500 years ago in Cyprus, an island without a native population of felines. That shows the cat was brought by boat and had a special relationship to that person, researchers say.
Cats were tame by about 3,500 years ago in Egypt, where paintings often placed them beneath chairs.
But the overall domestication process has been hard for scientists to track, in part because fossilized skeletons don’t reveal whether a cat was wild or domesticated.
It’s easier to distinguish dogs, our first domesticated animal, from their wolf ancestors. Dogs evolved from wolves that had begun to associate with people even before farming began, perhaps drawn by the food the humans left behind.
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.
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.
Researchers also looked for a genetic variant that produces the blotchy coat pattern typical of modern-day domestic cats, rather than the tiger-like stripes seen in their wild cousins. It showed up more often in samples from after the year 1300 than earlier ones, which fits with other evidence that the tabby cat markings became common by the 1700s and that people started breeding cats for their appearance in the 1800s.
