Ancient DNA reveals the origin and global spread of the domestic cat out of its ancestral home in Africa.
Ancient DNA reveals the origin and global spread of the domestic cat out of its ancestral home in Africa. When first domesticated, cats were striped. Only later did they show color morphs and changes in hair length.
I still remember how, when I was a graduate student in zoology, my officemate invested months into researching and writing a detailed treatise about the evolution and domestication of housecats,. She did this for fun, apparently to satisfy her own curiosity. But even then, she discovered that tracing the historic origins of cats was severely limited by the lack of ancient DNA and by domestic cats’ physical similarities to its closest relatives, the African wildcat,. So where did domestic cats originate? Who were their closest wild ancestors? What did the first domestic cats look like? “Cats were depicted in ancient Egyptian iconography as tabby that is common in its wild ancestor – the African wildcat,” said the study’s senior author, paleogenetecist Claudio Ottoni, an associate professor at theAn Egyptian Mau, a black-spotted silver tabby. The Egyptian Mau is an ancient breed that is quite rare. They are one of the few naturally spotted breeds of domesticated cat. “Cat phenotypic variants are mostly linked to aesthetic traits: coat pattern and color, fur length,” Professor Ottoni replied in email. “However, most of them appeared only recently in the history of cat-human relationships, probably in the last two centuries with the creation of breeds. Some variants may have popped out earlier, in particular, coat color and we are now investigating how far back in time they go. Regardless, it is likely that these variants appeared through human selection – humans liked new variants compared to what was common in the wild and started to select it.” Yet even though we can make educated guesses as to the appearance of modern cats, we still don’t know much about the origins and historical routes followed by domesticated cats as they traveled alongside humans across the European landscape and beyond.Professor Ottoni and a large international collaboration of scientists recently published their study that aims to address this gap in our knowledge. In short, the authors of this study found that domestic cats are most genetically similar to African wildcats, which currently live in North Africa and the Near East. Additionally, they found that European wildcats, which are native to Europe, Great Britain and Ireland, cluster genetically with domestic cats – but only those that livedthe First Century CE – indicating that domestic cats dispersed alongside humans much later than originally thought and were not introduced into Europe during the Neolithic period, as often presumed. Further, widespread gene flow and strong physical similarities between wild and domestic populations made these two sister species’ relationships challenging to untangle. The introduction of domestic cats to Europe. The genomes of ancient cats from archaeological sites across Europe and Anatolia revealed that domestic cats were introduced to Europe from North Africa starting at approximately 2 thousand years ago , several millennia after the onset of the Neolithic in Europe. African wildcats in Sardinia originate from a distinct wildcat population in Northwest Africa.Currently, there are two known locations where early cat domestication is thought to have occurred: one was in the Neolithic Levant area around 9,500 years ago and the other was in Pharaonic Egypt around 3,500 years ago. The evidence for domestication in the Levant is revealed by the ancient remains of one cat buried alongside a human. In contrast, ancient Egyptian culture abounds with evidence of cat domestication, ranging from mummified cat remains to paintings of cats eating off dishes near humans. This new study finds that our beloved pet cats may have dispersed from what is now Türkiye into Europe alongside ancient farmers, or as the result of following marauding Roman soldiers. But were these dispersing cats truly domesticated or were they a distinct lineage of wildcats? Facsimile of a wall painting of a cat eating a fish whilst sitting under her human's chair, from the Tomb of Nakht . Notice the cat's stripes. Unfortunately, this painting has disintegrated tremendously since it was first documented by Nina De Garis Davis. .)To investigate these questions, Professor Ottoni, Marco de Martino, a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Ottoni’s lab, and a large number of collaborators conducted paleogenomic analyses and genomic reconstructions of 87 archaeological, museum-held and modern cat genomes. The team, led by Dr de Martino, generated 70 low-coverage genomes from archaeological specimens spanning 11,000 years – from roughly 9000 BCE to the 19Century – and 17 higher-coverage genomes from modern and museum-held wildcats remains from Italy, Bulgaria, and North Africa. Examining genomic DNA mutations allowed Professor Ottoni, Dr de Martino and collaborators to scrutinize the evolution of cats and to identify how geography played a role, according to Dr Di Martino. Professor Ottoni, Dr de Martino and collaborators were surprised to discover that the remains of ancient cats that were thought to have arrived in the West around 6,000 years ago turned out instead to be European wild cats,domesticated cats. Instead, Professor Ottoni, Dr de Martino and collaborators’ studies revealed that true domestic cats actually evolved from African wildcats,, and only appeared in Europe and southwest Asia several thousand years after the close of the Neolithic period, often as the result of following Roman military routes, only reaching Britain by the First Century CE.The Sardinian wildcat is a subspecies of the African wildcat. These wildcats inhabit montane forests in the interior of the island of Sardinia, where it mainly preys upon small forest-dwelling rodents, as well as small birds, reptiles, and amphibians. In this study, Professor Ottoni, Dr de Martino and collaborators found that Sardinian wildcats – both ancient and modern – are a distinct population that is more closely related to North African wildcats than to domestic cats. “What I think was very exciting was the finding of a cat dated to 2nd century BCE from Sardinia that is genetically quite different from the domestic cats that dispersed in the last 2000 years ,” Professor Ottoni elaborated in email. “We believe that the Genoni cat may have belonged to the population that gave rise to the wildcat population , these results allow for hypothesizing that domestic cats and Sardinian wildcats derived from two genetically distinct populations in North Africa, represented in our dataset by Tunisian and Moroccan wildcats, respectively,” the authors cautioned in their study.Perhaps also surprising, the remains of cats and artistic depictions of them have been observed in various archaeological sites throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia for over 10,000 years, indicating that humans and cats had some sort of long-term relationship in certain cultures. But I ask once again: were these ancient cats “domesticated”? “ats remain quite an unconventional ‘domestic’ species, with unique features that make them very peculiar compared to other domesticates. In fact, many really wonder if that can be defined as truly domesticated,” Professor Ottoni told me in email. Wildcat skulls or domestic cat skulls? Ancient cat skulls analysed in the dedicated ancient DNA facilities of the Department of Biology at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. Further, sparse archaeological remains and the difficulty of distinguishing domestic from wild felines based on solely on bones have left major gaps in our understanding of the origin and spread of early domestic cats. “This is due to a variety of factors, including the paucity of felid remains in archaeological contexts, the difficulty of assigning species and domestication status to skeletal elements , and the limited number of ancient and modern genomes analyzed so far,” the authors write in their study. “As a result, present hypotheses regarding when, where, and how cats were domesticated are poorly supported by empirical evidence.” The study authors speculate in their study that wildcats may have been domesticated by humans for purely pragmatic reasons. “The relationship between humans and wildcats in Europe was possibly based on exploitation for fur and food, as suggested by the Mesolithic samples from Galgenbühel / Dos de la Forca,” the study authors write. “However, more complex sociocultural and symbolic relationships should not be discounted, considering the wildcat remains analyzed here are from Bronze Age Partanna collected in a bell-shaped vase and a feline clay head from Chalcolithic Bulgaria.” Egyptian crown Prince Thutmose had this limestone sarcophagus created especially for his beloved cat, Ta-miu . This sarcophagus is completely decorated with scenes, while the lid is inscribed with hieroglyphs. On the side, it shows the cat sitting before an offering table heaped with treats for the afterlife.“All in all, I think it is incredible to see how successful cats were: 2000 years sounds like a relatively short time in evolutionary terms; other popular domestic species were domesticated and started to spread with humans earlier ,” Professor Ottoni told me in email. “It is striking that in such short time, cats were able to ‘conquer the world’ from their original distribution range – North Africa.” Whilst this study does help narrow down the origins of modern domestic cats, the authors note that more data from Egypt in particular would help to more accurately pinpoint source populations. “Our results offer a new interpretive framework for the geographic origin of domestic cats, suggesting a broader and more complex process of domestication that may have involved multiple regions and cultures in North Africa,” the study’s authors conclude. “Efforts should continue to narrow down the original source population of present-day domestic cats and to clarify the cultural and socioeconomic processes that led to their domestication and promoted their global dispersal.”M. De Martino, B. De Cupere, V. Rovelli, P. Serventi, B. Mouraud, M. Baldoni, T. Di Corcia, S. Geiger, F. Alhaique, P. C. Alves, H. Buitenhuis, E. Ceccaroni, E. Cerilli, J. De Grossi Mazzorin, C. Detry, M. Dowd, I. Fiore, L. Gourichon, I. Grau-Sologestoa, H. C. Küchelmann, G. K. Kunst, M. McCarthy, R. Miccichè, C. Minniti, M. Moreno, N. Mrđić, V. Onar, T. Oueslati, M. Parrag, B. Pino Uria, G. Romagnoli, M. Rugge, L. Salari, K. Saliari, A. B. Santos, U. Schmölcke, A. Sforzi, G. Soranna, N. Spassov, A. Tagliacozzo, V. Tinè, S. Trixl, S. Vuković, U. Wierer, B. Wilkens, S. Doherty, N. Sykes, L. Frantz, F. Mattucci, R. Caniglia, G. Larson, J. Peters, W. Van Neer, and C. Ottoni .
Genomics Grrlscientist Population Dynamics European Wildcat African Wildcat Domestication Domestic Cat Ancient Egypt Pets
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