The domestic cat arrived in Europe only about 2,000 years ago from populations in North Africa, reveals a new study, which questions the belief that the cradle of this feline is in the Near East and has accompanied European humans since the Neolithic.
A study that publishes Science uses the analysis of nuclear DNA from the genome of 70 cats from sites in Europe and Anatolia, and another 17 from modern wild cats from Europe and North Africa, which represents the most complete genetic reconstruction of their origin and dispersion.
The domestication of the cat “is a very complex process” that could have involved multiple regions and cultures in North Africa, says archaeozoologist Marta Moreno, researcher at the Institute of History of the Higher Scientific Research Council (CSIC) and one of the signatories of the article.
It is possible that there were several domestication centers, “but of course, North Africa plays a fundamental role in their arrival in Europe.” As for the moment, it would be the 1st century BC “practically,” he says, “it was with the Romans that the expansion of the domestic cat throughout Europe occurred.”
The research, led by the University of Rome Tor Vergata, identifies two main waves of the arrival of the African wildcat in Europe.
The first, during the first millennium BC, is documented in Sardinia, where a lineage from northwest Africa gave rise to the population of wild cats that is still preserved on the island, notes the CSIC.
The second, decisive for the history of the modern domestic cat, occurred in Roman times, when from the 1st century BC onwards they spread domestic cats along their commercial, military and maritime routes, spreading them throughout the Mediterranean, central Europe and Britain.
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The work also examines how domestic and wild lineages interacted after their introduction. Genetic hybridization was limited in Roman times, intensified during the Middle Ages and continues today in some areas, with relevant repercussions for the conservation of the European wildcat.
These results, based on genetic studies, challenge the belief that Neolithic farmers from the Near East had introduced domesticated cats to Europe to protect their crops.
Livestock herds come to Europe from the Near East, where the domestication process took place, and the cat has been included in that group, an idea contributed to by the discovery of a joint human-cat burial around 7500 BC in Cyprus, which suggested early domestication, Moreno indicates.
On the other hand, later Egyptian art and animal burials point to a second focus of domestication in Egypt that would be later.
The new study contradicts these two views and the genomic analyzes indicate that the felines recovered in Neolithic and Chalcolithic sites (from the 7th to the 3rd millennium BC) in southeastern Europe and Anatolia were, in reality, wild cats whose ancestors had hybridized with non-domesticated African cats a long time before.
The researchers propose a paradigm shift regarding the arrival and evolution of the domestic cat, by showing that its domestication was not a unique or localized process.
On the contrary, it was “a complex and possibly multicentric phenomenon within North Africa, and its arrival in Europe was late, linked to the Mediterranean networks promoted by Phoenicians, Punics and Romans, who played a much more important role in its expansion than the Neolithic societies of the Near East”, explains the CSIC.
This study, adds Moreno, highlights the importance of recovering faunal remains in archaeological excavations, since they constitute a heritage with which knowledge can be generated, not only about the distribution and dispersion of animal species, but about the multiple relationships that human communities established with them.
With information from EFE
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