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First large-scale study of ancient feline DNA charts domestication in Near East and Egypt and the global spread of house cats. Thousands of years before cats came to dominate Internet culture, they swept through ancient Eurasia and Africa carried by early farmers, ancient mariners and even Vikings, finds the first large-scale look at ancient-cat DNA. The study, presented at a conference on 15 September, sequenced DNA from more than 200 cats that lived between about 15,000 years ago and the eighteenth century ad. Researchers know little about cat domestication, and there is active debate over whether the house cat (Felis...

n the first large-scale study of ancient feline DNA, the results reveal how our inscrutable friends were domesticated in the Near East and Egypt some 15,000 years ago, before spreading across the globe and into our hearts. The study was presented at the International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology in Oxford, UK back in 2016, and sequenced DNA from 209 cats that lived between 15,000 and 3,700 years ago - so from just before the advent of agriculture right up to the 18th century. Found in more than 30 archaeological sites in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, these ancient feline...