All house cats have a common origin in the Fertile Crescent, says study

All house cats worldwide have a common origin in the Fertile Crescent, a region made up of the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia; the Levant; and Egypt’s Nile Valley, according to a new study published in Nature December 5, 2022.

Cats were domesticated around 10,000 years ago, when humans transitioned to sedentary farming from hunting-gathering.

As grain stores grew, they attracted mice. The rodents were followed by wild cats and this led to “a synanthropic trinity between humans, rodents, and felids”, the study, titled Genetics of randomly bred cats support the cradle of cat domestication being in the Near East, said:

Archeological evidence suggests the domestication process of Felis silvestris lybica individuals initiated in the Near East with agrarian societal development within the Fertile Crescent and the Levant, intensified in Egypt along with cultural worships, leading to human migration and trade facilitating the domesticated feline diaspora.

However, cats are unlike other domesticated animals. This is because if they are let loose, they can still survive by catching vermin animals and continue to breed.

The team of researchers from the University of Missouri who carried out the study collected and analysed DNA from cats in and around the Fertile Crescent area, as well as throughout Europe, Asia and Africa, comparing nearly 200 different genetic markers.

The researchers wrote that observed heterozygosity was higher in populations located near the Mediterranean Basin of the Fertile Crescent where archaeological evidence points towards the first human-cat interactions.

“In addition, these populations have a shorter genetic distance to the progenitor species F.s. lybica. The origin of domestication for F.s. catus is suggested as the coastal regions of the Mediterranean Basin of the Fertile Crescent where cats have high observed heterozygosity and a short genetic distance to the progenitor subspecies,” they noted.

‘Cat diaspora’

The researchers used two types of genetic markers to map the spread of house cats from the Fertile Crescent to the rest of the world. These are ‘microsatellites’ and ‘single nucleotide polymorphisms’.

Microsatellites mutate very quickly and give clues about recent cat populations and breed developments over the past few hundred years, the scientists told the website Phys.org.

Single nucleotide polymorphisms are single-based changes all throughout the genome that give clues about a species’ ancient history several thousands of years ago.

The house cat spread from the Levantine coast to the Nile Valley of Egypt. Here, “cultural integration of felines into society slightly decreased heterozygosity and increased the genetic distance from the initial founders”, according to the researchers.

The cats also spread across the Mediterranean littoral from the First Millennium Before Common Era. This dispersal was of Egyptian cats and facilitated by Phoenician, Carthaginian, Greek, Etruscan traders and later by the Romans.

Cats also spread east from West Asia with the development of agriculture and trade, specifically along the Silk Road.

Perhaps the greatest dispersal of cats began with the ‘Age of Discovery’. As Europeans colonised and settled new lands, they took European cats with them to the Americas and Australia.

“The data suggest cats in distant areas from the Near East, including Australia, the Americas, and colonial regions such as Tunisia and mainland Kenya, are close derivatives of Western European cats, reflecting Western European colonization,” the study noted.

It also revealed other interesting aspects. For instance, cats in Kenyan islands like Lamu and Pate as well as Madagascar, Oman, Kuwait and Iran could be descendants of animals brought by traders travelling across the Arabian Sea and western Indian Ocean.

This maritime trade had played a key role in the Swahili city states of East Africa, a region extending from Somali and Kenya to Mozambique. Muslim traders from south Asia, Persia and the Arab world intermarried with local Africans to produce Swahili (from Sahel, Arabic for ‘Coast’) culture.

Cats in Pakistan “tend to have more European influence than other countries in the Middle East, possibly due to the influence and control of the British East India Company in Southern Asia, which is supported by several significant f3 statistics with a contributing population from Europe”.

India and Sri Lanka “both have ancestry admixture from many populations and higher observed heterozygosity attesting to the large amounts of movement of traders due to land and maritime Silk Road routes”.

The researchers wrote that additional studies including data from various wildcat species/subspecies, particularly Asiatic wild cats from Iraq, Iran, the Indus Valley region, and Northwestern India could further explain the genetic variation seen in cat populations

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