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Today's house cats all come from a single type of wildcat. Researchers believe that itwas originally from the Near East, in a region from modern-day Turkiye down to Lebanon.Around 10,000 years ago, farmers began storing grain. The grain attracted mice. Cats couldhelp out with that. The same type of cats also ruled in Ancient Egypt. They left their traces in statues andpaintings. Researchers wondered how these two separate line
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s led to today's worldwidesuccess of cats. Unlike other archaeologists,Eva-Maria Geigl studied DNA instead of bones.Combining the genetic information with other records, the researchers figured out the cats'paths. After cats befriended the Near East farmers, they began to appear on farms inother places. One example is a 9,500-year-old cat buried in a human grave on the island ofCyprus, There were no wild cats on the island. Th
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ey must have come from somewhere else.Humans must have brought them on a boat. A second wave of cats began living with humans in Egypt 2,500 years ago. The newstudy shows that during Roman times, these Egyptian cats also began expanding through theMediterranean ). They mixed with the Near East cats and then went farther. Theywent through Europe and into Southwest Asia. When the Viking age began, the expansion of Egyptian cat f
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amilies exploded. lt waslikely due to the popularity of using ship cats to kill rats. "'Rats on ships not only eat and spoilthe food, they also destroy the ropes, so rats could be a disaster for sailors," says Geigl. "Catsprevent these types of disasters.
