From Wildcat to Sofa: How Cats Came Into Our Homes

When we look at one of our Ragdolls sprawled on the sofa, with that almost disarming trust in people, it is easy to forget that behind every domestic cat lies a story thousands of years long. A story that does not begin in a living room, but in the fields and villages of the first farmers, and that archaeological and genetic research has reconstructed with growing precision.

A precise ancestor: the African wildcat

All the world’s domestic cats, from the commonest house cat to selected breeds like the Ragdoll, descend from a single subspecies: Felis silvestris lybica, the wildcat of the Near East and North Africa. It is a small feline with a sandy-coloured tabby coat, solitary, territorial, a hunter of rodents. At first sight, not an animal that seems destined to live alongside humans.

And yet it was precisely its feeding habits that made the encounter possible. The wildcat feeds mainly on small rodents, and small rodents, at a certain point in human history, found an unprecedented abundance of food.

The Fertile Crescent and the granaries of the Neolithic

With the birth of agriculture in the Near East, in the region we call the Fertile Crescent, human communities began to store grain. The stores attracted mice, and the mice attracted cats. It is likely that the relationship began this way: not with a deliberate human choice, but with a spontaneous approach by the cats most tolerant of human presence, which found in the villages a steady source of prey.

For this reason many scholars speak, for the cat, of a largely "self-directed" domestication: an animal that came closer to humans more than humans sought it out. An idea familiar to anyone who lives with cats, and one of the most fascinating mysteries of evolution.

The oldest evidence of a close bond between a person and a cat comes from an unexpected place: the island of Cyprus. In 2004 a team of archaeologists led by Jean-Denis Vigne published in Science the discovery, at the Neolithic site of Shillourokambos, of a burial dating to about 9,500 years ago. Beside the remains of an adult person a young cat of about eight months had been deliberately laid.

The decisive detail is that Cyprus never had native wildcats: the animals must have arrived by sea, brought by people. And the care taken over the burial suggests a special relationship. We cannot know whether that cat was already "domestic" in the modern sense, but it certainly lived close to humans and was considered worthy of a place beside them.

Egypt and the cat as a presence in the home

Many people link the origin of the domestic cat to ancient Egypt, and indeed Egyptian civilisation played an enormous role in its history. Here the cat appears in art, in daily life and in the religious sphere, to the point of being associated with deities and, in some periods, mummified in vast numbers.

But Egypt is not where the story begins: it is rather where the cat becomes fully a familiar presence and from where, later, a second great spread begins.

What ancient DNA tells us

In 2017 a study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution by Claudio Ottoni and colleagues analysed the DNA of hundreds of ancient cats from archaeological sites across a very broad span of time and space. The results tell a story in two stages.

– A first spread starts from the Near East during the Neolithic, together with the first farming communities.
– A second, much wider wave gathers momentum in the classical period, when cats of Egyptian lineage spread throughout the Old World.
– The movements follow human trade routes, over land and above all by sea: cats travelled on ships, probably also to protect provisions from rodents.

The same study observes that one coat variant, the blotched tabby, becomes common only after the Middle Ages. It is a clue that the deliberate selection of appearance in cats arrived very late compared with other domestic animals.

From late selection to modern breeds

This last point concerns us closely. For millennia the cat remained an animal selected more by circumstances than by human intention: useful, tolerated, then loved, but rarely bred with precise criteria. Breeds as we know them today, with standards, pedigree registries and shows, are a recent phenomenon.

The Ragdoll is an example: a young breed, born in the second half of the twentieth century, which nonetheless carries within it all of this ancient history. Its gentle character and its inclination for contact are the point of arrival, not the beginning, of a relationship that humans and cats have been building for nearly ten thousand years.

A relationship that renews itself

We like to think that every cat entering a home repeats, in miniature, that first approach. The cat chooses, observes, gets used to things in its own time. Respecting this nature, and a soul that is its own, different from ours but real, is the best way to honour the long road that brought it to us.

If you would like to explore what it means today to share your home with a Ragdoll, we invite you to read our information guide Living with a Ragdoll.

Sources

– Vigne J.-D. et al., Early Taming of the Cat in Cyprus, Science, 2004: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1095335
– ScienceDaily, Oldest Known Evidence Of Cat Taming Found In Cyprus, 2004: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/04/040409092827.htm
– Ottoni C. et al., The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world, Nature Ecology & Evolution 1, 0139, 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0139
– Phys.org, Ancient DNA reveals role of Near East and Egypt in cat domestication, 2017: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-ancient-dna-reveals-role-east.html

Photo: iStock.com/Angelika