Cats arrived in Britain in the first century AD as a result of the Roman conquest, a study has found.
The origin of the domesticated cat has long been debated, with some people believing they emerged in ancient Egypt and others saying they came to Europe from Stone Age farmers in what is now Turkey.
But a genetic analysis of 87 cats dating back 10,000 years, including 70 ancient specimens, found that the lineage of felines seen in the modern world only emerged around 2,000 years ago in north Africa.
The Roman Empire, with its famed network of roads spanning from the Levant to Scotland, then allowed cats to conquer the continent alongside humans.
The household cat evolved from the African wildcat and domestication led to a new species being created.
“Since the Roman Imperial era, cats more genetically similar to present-day domestic cats were spread across Europe from a distinct north African population,” the scientists write in their study.
“The earliest sample carrying the ancestry found in present-day domestic cats was dated to 50BC to 80AD, from the site of Mautern, in Austria.”
After the cats emerged they spread rapidly, the scientists say. A cat in Fishbourne, England, that may have lived at the time of the Roman conquest, proves this, the scientists say.
“The ancient DNA records a quick spread of these domestic cats throughout much of Europe, often in concert with the Roman military, appearing in Britain around 100AD,” Professor Jonathan B Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Washington St Louis University, who was not involved with the study, said.
The exact origin of the pet cat we know and love today remains unknown. The scientists traced it back to north Africa, but were unable to narrow it down any further.
Scholars have long touted ancient Egypt as the birthplace of the pet cat because of the society’s veneration and deification of the animals.
But the latest study is unable to prove this and suggests Moroccan or Tunisian wildcats may be more likely than the Egyptian Pharaohs as a source population.
“Our results suggest that the dispersal of domestic cats occurred several millennia after the Neolithic, and likely from north Africa rather than the Levant,” the scientists write in their paper, published in Science.
“Our results offer a new interpretative framework for the geographic origin of domestic cats, suggesting a broader and more complex process of domestication that may have involved multiple regions and cultures in north Africa.”