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Abstract:

Notwithstanding its popularity, the origin of the domestic cat remains still elusive. In contrast to livestock species, cats are solitary hunters defending fiercely their home range; they miss a hierarchical structure and are obligate carnivores, all features which make them unlikely candidates for domestication. Until recently the general belief was that the initial domestication of cats took place in ancient Egypt at least by 1,700 BC, during the Egyptian New Kingdom, mainly based on evidence from figurative art. In the 1st millennium BC the cat was associated with a local deity and its popularity reached its peak during the Ptolemaic period (332-30 BC). Recent zooarchaeological evidence suggests possible attempts of cat taming in Egypt even earlier, probably in the Predynastic period (ca. 3,700 BC). However, a complete cat skeleton found in association with a human burial dated to ~7,500 BC in Cyprus suggests that early taming of cats has arisen in the early Neolithic agricultural societies of the Near and Middle East, as a form of control of rodent populations attracted by cereal deposits. A phylogenetic study of mtDNA and autosomal markers in modern wild and domestic cats showed that only one of the five Felis silvestris subspecies in the Old World contributed to the genetic pool of modern domestic cats, the Near Eastern/African distributed F. s. libyca. The main goal of the present study was to investigate mtDNA variation in ancient cats from Europe, Africa and the Near and Middle East, chronologically spanning from the Paleolithic to the 18th century AD. Results gathered in total from 197 ancient cats represents to date the first dataset of ancient Felis silvestris sequences, and provide clues about past distributions of this species and the trajectories of human-mediated translocations related to migrations and trades in prehistoric and historic times.