About 10000 years ago, Wim van Neer, a Neolithic farmer in Anatolia (present-day Turkey), domesticated cats to prevent pests. Cats are very useful As early as 4400 BC, farmers brought them to Europe. When sailors and other people who hated rodents brought them to the ancient world, cats spread quickly. But it was not until the Middle Ages that the recessive gene mutation related to tabby cat markers appeared. This variation first appeared in the Near East, and then spread throughout Europe and Africa. In addition, it was not until the19th century that humans began to breed cats with strange fur patterns. The researchers said that this shows that early domesticated cats only pay attention to behavioral characteristics, not aesthetic characteristics. "This shows that cats have not been strongly selected for breeding for a long time," said Eva Maria Geiger, research director and joint senior researcher of the French National Center for Scientific Research. Today's varieties, especially fancy varieties, are mostly modern "inventions" in the19th century. "[Read all the stories about cat domestication]"

The earliest evidence of domestication of cats in Hierakonpolis comes from Anatolia, but the ancient Egyptians also domesticated cats. It is not clear whether Anatolian cats and Egyptian cats are of the same or different ancestry. Here, Wim Van Neer, the co-author of this study and a professor of biological archaeology at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, excavated the remains of a cat 6,000 years ago in Syracuse, Egypt. However, the researchers did not include any cats from Sheila Compolis in their analysis.

Egyptian murals

(Copyright Thierry Granci) This chapel of the Egyptian Mausoleum in Nabamon was built around 1250 BC and exhibited in the British Museum. Pay attention to the stripes on the cat, which are reminiscent of the marks of wild cats.

A 6000-year-old cat is still found in Hierakonpolis, Egypt. As mentioned earlier, the researchers did not include any cats from Syracuse. Instead, these cats told another study that life science covered the domestication of cats.

Cat DNA (Copyright DNA(Sheila Compolis Expedition) In order to study the origin of domestic cats, researchers extracted ancient DNA from cat bones. These 6,000-year-old cat specimens from Hierakonpolis, Egypt were not used for analysis, but the cat's bone and tooth specimens were strictly analyzed. "Starting with archaeological bones and teeth, we crushed a small part in a machine cooled by liquid nitrogen, extracted DNA from the powder with chemicals, purified it and analyzed it," Geiger told Life Science in an email.

The cat's mandible (copyright Eva Maria Geigl) is about 2, which is a 300-year-old cat's mandible from Entzem Gaspolsheim, an archaeological site of the Iron Age in France.

Cat Mummies (Copyright Thierry Granci) Egyptian cat mummies collected by the British Museum.

Claudio Ottoni, the head of research on the mystery of mummies, is a paleogeneticist at the University of Leuven. He examined a cat mummy at the National Museum of History in London. Researchers can't analyze the DNA of this mummy because the wrapped mummy can't be sampled. Instead, they took samples from corrupt mummies. [Read all the stories about cat domestication]