The domestic cat may be a far more recent arrival to Europe than previously thought, arriving roughly 2000 years ago and not because of the Paleolithic expansion of Near East farmers. The findings offer new insight into one of humanity’s most enigmatic animal companions and identify North Africa as the cradle of the modern housecat. The domestic cat has a long and complex, albeit uncertain, history. Genetic studies show that all modern cats descended from the African wildcat, which is found today in North Africa and the Near East. However, sparse archaeological remains and the difficulty of distinguishing domestic from wild felines based on bones alone have left major gaps in our understanding of the origin and spread of early domestic cats. A human-cat burial from ~7500 BCE in Cyprus suggests an early domestication in the Levant region, while later Egyptian art and animal burials point to a possible later origin in Pharaonic Egypt. Recent Genetic studies of ancient DNA have indicated that cats may have dispersed from what is now Türkiye into Europe alongside Neolithic farmers, supporting the idea that cat domestication began in the Levant during the rise of agriculture ~6,000 years ago. However, it remains unclear whether these animals were truly domesticated cats or a distinct lineage of wildcats.

To help resolve some of these mysteries, Marco de Martino and colleagues conducted paleogenomic analyses on 87 ancient and modern cat genomes. De Martino et al. generated 70 low-coverage genomes from archaeological specimens spanning more than 10,000 years (~9000 BCE to 19^th Century CE) and 17 higher-coverage genomes from modern and museum wildcats from Europe, North Africa, and Anatolia. Contrary to previous studies, the authors found that domestic cats most likely originated from North African wildcats, rather than from the Levant, and that true domestic cats only appeared in Europe and southwest Asia several thousand years after the Neolithic. Earlier cats in Europe and Türkiye were genetically European wildcats and reflect ancient hybridization rather than early domestication. After being introduced, North African domestic cats spread rapidly throughout Europe, often following Roman military routes, reaching Britain by the 1^st Century CE. What’s more, de Martino et al. show that Sardinian wildcats – both ancient and modern – are more closely related to North African wildcats than domestic cats, indicating that humans brought wildcats to islands where they did not naturally occur, and they are not descendants of a feral population of early domestic cats. “The study by de Martino et al. is part of an ongoing project, Project Felix, which also aims to tackle other outstanding questions concerning cat domestication,” writes Jonathan Losos in a related Perspective. “Ever sphinxlike, cats give up their secrets grudgingly.”