The cat was domesticated about 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, when the advent of agriculture made its help against rodents that threatened crops indispensable.
This is demonstrated by the study of the DNA of European, Asian and African cats, published in the Heredity magazine by an international research group coordinated by geneticist Leslie A. Lyons of the University of Missouri.
The evolutionary history of cats has been reconstructed by comparing nearly 200 genetic markers.
“One of the main markers we have studied are microsatellites, which change very rapidly and give us clues about cat populations and inbreeding over the last few centuries,” Lyons explains.
"Another key marker we looked at is single nucleotide polymorphisms, which instead give us clues about their early history several thousand years ago."
The study thus revealed that cats would have undergone a single domestication event in the Fertile Crescent (unlike horses and cattle which were domesticated at different times in various parts of the world) and from there would have then spread throughout the world, carried by the migratory waves of humans.
For this reason, modern Western European cats have a very different DNA from those of Southeast Asia, due to a phenomenon known as 'isolation by distance'.
"Actually we can refer to cats as semi-domesticated - Lyons points out - because if we let them loose in the wild, they would probably continue to hunt pests and would be able to survive and mate on their own thanks to their natural behaviors. Unlike of dogs and other pets, we haven't changed the behavior of cats much during the domestication process, so cats prove once again that they are special animals."