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Early Cats Traveled with Vikings and Farmers
By Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor | September 22, 2016 03:17pm ET
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Early Cats Traveled with Vikings and Farmers
Credit: chrisbrignell / Shutterstock.com
The early origins of domesticated cats are shrouded in mystery, but a new geneti
c analysis suggests that felines traveled the world with farmers and Vikings.
The News section of Nature reports that the broadest genetic analysis to date of
ancient cats reveals two waves of cat expansion. In the first wave, cats spread
from the Middle East into the eastern Mediterranean, alongside human farmers. T
he second wave of expansion started in Egypt
where cats had religious significan
ce and were often mummified
and spread by sea to Eurasia and Africa.
These discoveries come courtesy a study of the mitochondrial DNA of 209 ancient
cats whose remains were preserved at archaeological sites. Mitochondrial DNA is
passed down through the maternal line and is separate from the nuclear DNA that
comes from both parents. The research was presented at the 7th International Sym
posium on Biomolecular Archaeology, which took place between Sept. 14 and Sept.
16 at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. [See Images of the Ancien
t Egyptian Cats]
A lack of funding has caused research on cat domestication to lag behind researc
h on dog domestication, study researcher Eva-Maria Geigl, an evolutionary geneti
cist at the Institut Jacques Monod in France, told Nature. Archaeological eviden
ce suggests that cats and humans started to interact around the dawn of agricult
ure. In 2004, researchers reported in the journal Science that they'd discovered
a human and a cat buried together on the island of Cyprus. The burial dated bac
k 9,500 years. Prior to that discovery, researchers had thought that cats had be
en domesticated in Egypt about 4,000 years ago though the discovery of two cats
and four kittens in an animal burial ground in the Upper Egypt city of Hierakonp
olis in 2014 suggests the existence of some sort of cat husbandry in Egypt 2,000
years before that.
Villagers in China may have domesticated cats about 5,300 years ago, researchers
reported in 2013 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
. Based on a few bones, the scientists found that the cats ate a diet that was h
eavy in millet or, more likely, that they ate a diet heavy in rodents that ate a
lot of millet. This dietary information meshes with the theory that cats were d
rawn to early agricultural settlements by a plethora of prey. Humans would have
encouraged the feline infiltration because cats got rid of rodent pests.
According to Nature, the new research finds that the second wave of cat populati
on expansion took place thousands of years after the first, from the fourth cent
ury B.C. to the fourth century A.D. Mitochondrial DNA from Egyptian cats was fou
nd as far away as northern Germany at a Viking site dating to between A.D. 700 a
nd A.D. 1000, Geigl told Nature. These seafaring sorts probably kept cats on the
ir ships to discourage mice and rats, she said.
Geigl hopes to sequence the nuclear DNA of ancient cats as well, but she and her
team found one additional bit of feline trivia from the mitochondrial DNA effor

ts: The mutation responsible for the patchy coats of tabby cats didn't occur unt
il Medieval times.
Original article on Live Science.
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Author Bio
Stephanie Pappas
Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor
Stephanie interned as a science writer at Stanford University Medical School, an
d also interned at ScienceNow magazine and the Santa Cruz Sentinel. She has a ba
chelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a gradua
te certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor on
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