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People who live with cats like to joke about how these small fuzzy creatures are still wild, basically training us rather than the other way around. Now a new genetic study of ancient cat DNA reveals that we are basically right. Cats were not domesticated in the same way dogs, cows, pigs, and goats were. They have lived among us, but it wasn't until very recently that we began to change them.

Unlike dogs, whose bodies and temperaments have transformed radically during the roughly 30,000 years we've lived with them, domestic cats are almost identical to their wild counterparts-physically and genetically. House cats also show none of the typical signs of animal domestication, such as infantilization of facial features, decreased tooth size, and docility. Wildcats are neither social nor hierarchical, which also makes them hard to integrate into human communities.

Yet it's impossible to deny that cats are tame. We know that humans have lived with cats for at least 10,000 years-there's a 9,500-year-old grave in Cyprus with a cat buried alongside its human, and ancient Egyptian art has a popular motif showing house cats eating fish under chairs. Today, cats still share our homes and food, and for thousands of years they have worked alongside farmers and sailors to eradicate vermin. If we haven't domesticated cats, what exactly have we done to them?

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To find out, University of Leuven geneticist Claudio Ottoni worked with a large international team of researchers to analyze the mitochondrial DNA of more than 200 ancient and modern cats, spanning the past 9,000 years. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited unchanged solely from the mother, and it is often used to trace the ancestry of different species.

Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Ottoni and his colleagues report that five distinct clades of ancient cats rapidly spread outward from relatively small origin points. Over millennia, the clades from Egypt and Southwest Asia began to dominate the world. Mostly this was due to the spread of agriculture. Farming practices that began in the Levant and Western Asia took hold elsewhere, attracting rodents to grain stores. That, in turn, attracted wildcats, who eventually joined farming communities as companions-just as ancient dogs had joined hunting parties in the Paleolithic.

Then the researchers started to see weird data points, like an Egyptian cat at a Viking sea port during the Middle Ages, and Asian cats at a Roman Red Sea port during the height of the Roman Empire.

This map below shows the locations of domestic cat clades in the modern world. Note that the two most widespread lineages begin in Egypt (yellow) and southwest Asia (purple).

More: https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/06/cats-are-an-extreme-outlier-among-domestic-animals/