After studying the mitochondrial DNA of those 209 ancient cats, the study's authors say cat populations seem to have expanded in two waves. The first occurred in early Middle Eastern farming villages, where wild cats with a distinct mitochondrial lineage grew along with the human communities, eventually reaching the Mediterranean. As rodents congregated to steal food, wild cats were probably just capitalizing on the easy prey at first, then were adopted as farmers realized their benefits.
The second wave came millennia later, as the descendants of Egyptian domestic cats spread around Africa and Eurasia. Many of those Egyptian cat mummies had a particular mitochondrial lineage, and the researchers found that same lineage in contemporary cats from Bulgaria, Turkey, and sub-Saharan Africa.
This rapid expansion of cats was most likely linked to ship travel, the researchers say. Like farmers, mariners were often plagued by rodents seeking their food stores—and thus naturally predisposed to welcome rat-killing carnivores onboard. Geigl and her co-authors even found this same DNA lineage in cat remains at a Viking site in northern Germany, which they dated between the eighth and 11th centuries.
"There are so many interesting observations," Pontus Skoglund, a population geneticist at Harvard Medical School who wasn't involved in the study, tells Nature News. "I didn't even know there were Viking cats."
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And Fluffy and Garph seamlessly took over the micro world of even a guy like me who's life is smitten by Max.
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