Friendly felines first cozied up to humans in the Fertile Crescent at least 9,500 years ago, not in Egypt as commonly thought, an international team of researchers reported Thursday.
While archaeological evidence already suggested the date for the taming of wildcats, the new study, published in the online journal Science, provides genetic evidence that confirms the Near Eastern origin of domestic cats.
Farmers in what is now Saudi Arabia and Israel were probably happy to have cats around to protect stored grain from vermin.
"This was much earlier than Egyptian civilization," said geneticist Carlos Driscoll, lead author and a graduate student at the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at the University of Oxford.
The study also offers a new method for combating the extinction of some modern wildcats. Researchers sampled genetic material from 979 cats, including animals at fancy cat shows, feral cats and wildcats trapped in Mongolia and Kazakhstan.
They were able to sort the cats into six categories according to 36 DNA markers. Domestic cats fell into the same group as Near East wildcats, suggesting the two share a common ancestor.
In their analysis, they discovered genetic signatures of at least five female forebears of modern housecats, indicating there was more than one instance of domestication.
The scientists also looked for evidence of interbreeding among domestic and wild cats. The housecat gene pool, they found, was fairly free of wildcat DNA.
"What we're doing is part of a genetic background check on the domestic cat," Driscoll said.
Cats are often used in biomedical research, and scientists need to know that feline subjects in one study are the same as subjects in any other study.
On the other side, the researchers found that many wildcats have domestic genes. The dilution of wildcat populations by housecat DNA is the biggest threat to wildcat survival, said Pat Bumstead, director of the International Society for Endangered Cats.
