The macabre world of ancient Egyptian ritual sacrifice may have contributed to the domestication of cats, new research suggests.
Mummified cats (Felis catus) were such a common offering to the Egyptian gods around 3,000 years ago that humans started breeding them (along with other sacrificial species).
It’s estimated ancient Egyptians mummified up to 70 million animals including cats, shrews, falcons, crocodiles, and ibis during their reign in North Africa.
Raising cats together in large numbers to meet this demand would have favored more social and docile individuals. These tamer kitties were likely then traded across continents.
Another theory suggests cats gradually domesticated themselves in Europe during the Neolithic period, as humans transitioned into farming, providing felines with an ample supply of rodents that fed off our crops. This may have inspired rat-plagued farmers to encourage their presence for vermin control.
The discovery of a 9,500-year-old grave in 2004, containing human and cat remains in Cyprus, seemed to support the Neolithic domestication theory. But domestic cat morphology and DNA do not corroborate this scenario, two new studies, both still awaiting peer review, have now found.
University of Exeter zooarchaeoligst Sean Doherty and colleagues compared the bones of domestic cats with European wildcats (Felis silvestris) and found their features are no more similar than domestic cats are to African wildcats (Felis lybica).
What’s more, the Cyprus grave kitty is morphologically more similar to the European wildcat, not African. Its genetic material is, unfortunately, too degraded for study.
A non-European origin of F. catus is also corroborated by research from paleogeneticist Marco De Martino from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. His team’s genetic analysis supports African wildcats as the ancestors of domestic cats.
Examining 70 ancient cat genomes from archaeological sites across Europe, Anatolia, North Africa, Bulgaria, and Italy, the analysis appears to pinpoint the domestic cat’s most likely place of origin.
“Our results demonstrate that the dispersal of present-day domestic cats can be traced back not to the Neolithic or from the Fertile Crescent, but instead several millennia later and most likely from North Africa,” write De Martino and colleagues.
These genes revealed two waves of spread into the Mediterranean, the first during the 1st millennium BCE that introduced a wild population on the island of Sardinia, and a later wave that became the domestic cats we still coddle today.
The team found F. catus didn’t reach China until about the 8th century CE.
Other researchers still argue the cat domestication process began centuries before Egypt’s mass sacrifices. Instances of human relationships with cats certainly occurred multiple times, including the example in Cyprus as well as early Egyptian burials with cats around 3800 BCE, but these are not necessarily from the same line of cats that became F. catus.
The earliest genetically confirmed domestic cat is a mummified sacrifice as early as 500 BCE.
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“Genome data from modern and ancient cats from Egypt, which are currently lacking, will allow these two hypotheses to be tested,” De Martino and team concede.
If Egyptian origins of F. catus hold true, it wouldn’t be the first time religious worship spurred humans to carry animals with them, both teams of researchers point out.
“Cults and religions are often drivers for animal translocations. For instance, the spread of fallow deer has been directly linked to the cults of Artemis and Diana, while chickens were associated with Mercury and Mithras,” write Doherty and team.
“The Egyptian goddess Bastet … first appeared in the 3rd millennium BCE depicted with a lion’s head, but during the 9th-7th centuries BCE she was increasingly represented with the head of an African wildcat. This transformation was coincident with the rise of cat sacrifice, whereby millions of free-ranging and specifically-reared cats were mummified as offerings to the goddess.”
With such brutal acts at the start of our relationship with felines, it seems fitting cats have kept their temperamental reputations.
This research is awaiting peer review, and can be found here and here on bioRxiv.
