Where Do Cats Come From? Humans Owned Cats For Longer Than You’d Think

In the last two decades, it has been established that the Near Eastern wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica) is the common ancestor of all domesticated cats, and that they were first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent about 10,000 years ago.

It also could be said that cats domesticated themselves; they were attracted to the rodents that feasted off the harvests of the earliest farmers. They chose us, not the other way around. In turn, those early farmers appreciated this welcome form of pest control. So, unlike dogs—which were domesticated earlier, initially for hunting—cats weren’t bred for various specific purposes. They arrived as a “ready-made” symbiotic species, so to speak.

More recent finds in southern Poland push back the appearance of the domesticated cat in Central Europe by many more millennia: to the Neolithic (4330-2300 BC) and even the Pre-Neolithic (at Jasna Strzegowska Cave, 5990-5760 BC). Generally older (but also geographically closer to the Near Eastern origin of the house cat) are finds in Serbia from the Mesolithic-Neolitic era (6220-5730 BC).

These Neolithic house cats were similar in size to the European wildcat. Zooarchaeological evidence, from Poland and elsewhere in Europe, indicates these cats decreased in size to the Medieval period.

The reason for this unexpectedly early foray of domesticated cats into Europe is not traders, but farmers—or rather, farmers’ pests. The researchers speculate, “Recent data indicate a significant overlap in the appearance of house mice (Mus musculus) and cats in Late Neolithic Eastern Europe, and suggest that the house mouse was an important factor for the dispersal of cats within Europe.”