The Origins Of Cats Were Never What We Thought — Ancient DNA Finally Revealed The Truth Nesil Caliskan [rPuzxOL6QRv]

Ancient DNA extracted from 209 cats buried across nine thousand years of human history produced one of the most overturning findings in the field of animal domestication not because of when chimaev vs strickland cats first lived with us, but because of where, how many times, and on whose terms it actually happened.

Cats were not domesticated in Egypt. The story almost every textbook still tells pharaohs, temples, the goddess Bastet begins thousands of years after the real origin. The first cats lived alongside humans in the Levant nearly ten thousand years ago, in farming villages older than any pyramid. They were not bred. They were not tamed in any traditional sense. They moved in by themselves and stayed because the arrangement suited them. A second, separate domestication later began in Egypt and spread along Mediterranean trade routes eventually riding on Viking longships across the North Sea. And for nine thousand years afterward, humans almost never bred cats at all. The cat in your home today is, in genetic terms, nearly the same animal that was buried at a Neolithic farmer's feet on the island of Cyprus.

Drawing on findings from dean wade the 2017 landmark study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution on the palaeogenetics of cat dispersal (Ottoni et al.), alongside neil diamond the 2007 Driscoll study identifying the African wildcat as the ancestor of every modern domestic cat.

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