These 8,000-Year-Old Bones Prove Cats May Have Arrived In Europe Earlier Than Previously Assumed
Cats, our favorite cuddly companions, may have arrived in Europe earlier than previously assumed. In recent months, domestic cat bones that are roughly 8,000-years-old were found in Serbia and Poland.
The latest discovery has pushed back the timeline of cat domestication by several thousands of years.
Until now, it has been thought that cats arrived in Europe sometime between the 3rd and 7th centuries A.D.
However, they actually appeared earlier than that in the Balkans and further north from Asia Minor. There are five known species of wildcat, and all of them are very similar.
They can also interbreed, which has made it even more challenging for experts to determine when and where cat domestication first occurred.
In the past 20 years, it has been established that the Near Eastern wildcat is the common ancestor of all house cats.
These felines were domesticated about 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East.
Many scientists have suggested that cats domesticated themselves because they were drawn to the rodents that ate the crops of early farmers. Of course, the farmers appreciated their pest control skills.
Around 3,500 years ago, another domestication happened in Egypt. This population of cats was more friendly to humans.
sonyachny – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
The ancient Egyptians revered these creatures. The Egyptian goddess of love, Bastet, was often depicted with a cat’s head, and there are over 300,000 mummies of cats in the necropolis of Beni-Hassan.
A study from 2017 showed that the two populations from Fertile Crescent and Egypt contributed to the common domesticated cat we know and love today.
Cats were believed to have spread throughout the Mediterranean while traveling with the Greeks and Romans. They were in ancient Greece by 1400 B.C. and arrived in republican Rome in about 500 B.C.
They reached Britannia in about 100 B.C. They were only noted in Scotland from 500 to 800 A.D., which was when the Vikings developed an affinity for them. They took the cats on long voyages across Europe, helping to spread their range even further.
In 2016, radiocarbon dating showed that the domestic cat was present in Poland during Roman times, complicating knowledge of cat domestication. It meant that cat domestication occurred a thousand years earlier than previously thought.
More recently, finds in southern Poland have made cat domestication in Central Europe older by many more millennia.
The domesticated cat showed up in the Neolithic and the pre-Neolithic periods. The finds from Serbia date back to the Mesolithic-Neolithic era, which is even older.
The Neolithic cats were a similar size to the European wildcat. Evidence suggests that the cats’ body size decreased in the medieval period.
Researchers speculate that the early appearance of domesticated cats in Europe was due to the emergence of house mice. The mice were a key factor in the spread of cats within Europe.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
More About:Animals
