“You would know him if you saw him, for his eyes are sunken in/His brow is deeply lined with thought, his head is highly domed; His coat is dusty from neglect, his whiskers are uncombed. He sways his head from side to side, with movements like a snake; And when you think he’s half asleep, he’s always wide awake.”
Thus goes T.S. Eliot’s famous poem on his beloved feline: the domestic cat.
But when, and from where, did these creatures come to colonise the world and enter Eliot’s poetic imagination in London? A new Sciencepaper dug deep into the historical movements of the mystery cat and found that the domestic cat (Felis catus) originated from the African wildcat (Felis lybica lybica) and quickly spread, most likely by ship, across the globe just 2,000 years ago.
Researchers analysed 87 ancient and modern cat genomes — across Europe and Anatolia and 17 modern wildcats from Italy (including Sardinia), Bulgaria, and North Africa (Morocco and Tunisia) — and generated a genomic time transect spanning 11,000 years.
The researchers challenged the commonly held view of a Neolithic introduction (from West Asia) of domestic cats to Europe, instead placing their arrival several millennia later, and from North Africa.
The ancestor
The ancestor to all modern domestic cats, the genetic findings revealed, is the African wildcat, presently distributed across North Africa and the Near East. Interestingly, domestic cats shared more genetic affinities with wildcats particularly with the Tunisian ones.
The researchers identified at least two waves of introduction to Europe: first, a dispersal of wildcats from Northwest Africa that were introduced to Sardinia and founded the island’s present-day wild population; second, a distinct and yet-unknown population in North Africa that dispersed not later than 2,000 years ago that established the gene pool of modern domestic cats in Europe.
“Domestic cats form a distinct sister clade [cluster] to the African wildcats, thus suggesting a closer genetic proximity to these wildcats than to the modern Levantine [West Asian] population,” the researchers wrote. One of the “most successful mammalian domesticates,” the cat has a worldwide presence, even in remote islands. Including feral cats, their global population is approaching a staggering one billion, the paper added.
Author Claudio Ottoni, associate professor anthropology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and his co-authors studied ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) data and realised that the timing and circumstances of cat domestication and dispersal remain “uncertain”.
For instance, while archaeozoological and iconographic evidence has pointed to two possible centres of domestication — the Neolithic Levant (West Asia) around 9,500 years ago and the Pharaonic Egypt around 3,500 years ago — genetic analysis has placed the years of domestication to 2,000 years ago.
Levant and humans
“Cats were definitely interacting with humans in the Levant [West Asia] in the Neolithic period, more than 10,000 years ago, but these were most likely wildcats that were not ultimately domesticated,” Dr. Ottoni told The Hindu. “A so-called commensal relationship was established between African wildcats in the Levant and humans in the Neolithic period, suggesting that cats were attracted to human settlements of the farmers who were storing grain that brought in rodents and other pests,” he added.
As for the relationship between humans and wildcats in Europe, it was possibly based on hunting for fur. “However, more complex sociocultural and symbolic relationships should not be discounted,” the authors pointed out.
So what drove the translocation of cats to newcultural settings?
The paper hypothesised thus: “As with the human-mediated dispersal of domestic chickens or fallow deer, the initial translocation of cats could have been religiously motivated… Dispersal trajectories may also have been driven by the benefits of cats as pest controllers on ships, in view of the extensive maritime trade network of Carthage and the role of Egypt as a major grain supplier to the Roman Empire.”
Muse to menace
Dr. Ottoni expressed belief they travelled across the Mediterranean via the trade routes that connected the Roman Empire with North Africa, and also together with the Roman Empire and its entourage of people that were moving across the European continent.
But Eliot’s elusive muse has become a bit of a menace today, and has “markedly impact[ed] biodiversity,” a 2023 paper in Nature reported. The researchers identified 2,084 species eaten by cats, “of which 347 (16.65%) are of conservation concern.” Birds, reptiles, and mammals constitute around 90% of species consumed, while insects and amphibians were less frequent, the paper says.
But “another sampling issue requires more serious consideration,” cautions a Science commentary published last month. The author, Jonathan B. Losos, at the department of biology, Washington University in St Louis, US observed that we might have thought that “with the abundance of Egyptian cat mummies, there would be no shortage of ancient genomic data from northern Africa; however, recovering such data from mummies is notoriously difficult and other types of feline remains in the archaeological record from this region are not common.”
By the time of Thutmose III (around 3,500 years ago), the cat was already a household pet in Ancient Egypt. We know this from “tomb-wall depictions of cats as family members adorned in collars, earrings, and necklaces; eating from dishes; sitting attentively under the chair of the woman of the house; and even accompanying the family on boating expeditions,” Dr. Losos wrote. And then, the rise of the goddess Bastet, (a woman with the head of a cat) “elevated the felines to revered status.”
“Technology has driven the way we unfold and understand historical events and has also clarified how humans have influenced species distributions, and still do, Shomita Mukherjee, a cat ecologist, told The Hindu. In this case genomic information is fast changing our understanding of the history of several domestic and wild species, she added.
divya.gandhi@thehindu.co.in
Published – December 09, 2025 03:00 pm IST
