SUBSISTENCE × SOCIETY × GENETICS

The Domestication of the Cat

~9,500 years ago

Neolithic · Neolithic · Holocene · Greenlandian

The domestic cat descends from the African wildcat Felis lybica lybica, a small predator at home across the Near East and North Africa, and its entry into human settlements is read as a commensal pathway: the wildcats came for the rodents feeding on stored grain rather than for their owners, and the arrangement served both sides. The earliest sign of a close relationship is a wildcat buried beside a human on Cyprus about 9,500 years ago. Genetic comparison of 979 domestic cats with their wild progenitors places domestication in the Near East, probably at the same moment as the first farming villages of the Fertile Crescent, and traces the living population to at least five founders whose descendants were carried around the world by people. Between that burial and the first unmistakable domestic cats, painted in Egypt some 4,000 years ago, the record falls almost silent.

Why it matters

Most farm animals were taken for their meat, their milk or their strength; this one arrived on its own account, drawn by a pest that appeared only once grain was stored in quantity. A domestication of that kind begins at a granary and not in a herd. The animal then travelled as people travelled, along the maritime and overland routes of trade, and the gene pool of the modern cat keeps the trace of two such journeys, one out of the Near East and one out of Egypt, at different periods. Deliberate breeding came late: a coat-colour variant reaches high frequency only after the Middle Ages, later than for most other domestic animals.

Dating & uncertainty

The date carried here, ~9,500 years ago within 9,500 to 9,000, belongs to the Cyprus burial and not to a domestication: the interment attests a close relationship, not a domestic animal. Where the lineage crossed over is still open. A study of 87 ancient and modern genomes published in 2025 holds the choice between the Levant, Egypt and the rest of the African wildcat range to be unresolved, and concludes that domestic cats did not reach Europe with Neolithic farmers but around 2,000 years ago, probably from North Africa. Should that reading hold, the early taming attested on Cyprus is not the source of the cats of Europe today.

Sources

1. Hu et al. (2013), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · Earliest evidence for commensal processes of cat domesticationdoi:10.1073/pnas.1311439110
2. Driscoll et al. (2007), Science · The Near Eastern Origin of Cat Domesticationdoi:10.1126/science.1139518
3. Ottoni et al. (2017), Nature Ecology & Evolution · The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient worlddoi:10.1038/s41559-017-0139
4. De Martino et al. (2025), Science · The dispersal of domestic cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 years agodoi:10.1126/science.adt2642

Our species’ history as one day

23:16:3443 min 26 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day