This world belongs to the "boss", and humans have given them all - cats.
It is often said jokingly that this world really belongs to cats. Indeed, the "boss" is like being born to be served by humans.
That's why in the whole world, except for Antarctica, all continents have boss footprints.
It is often said jokingly that this world really to cats.
But the origin of this "invasion" process is still being thoroughly debated by scientists. According to the concept so far, the ancient Egyptians were the first characters to bring cats to humans.
However, it turns out that cats have deeper roots than that, and that has been officially confirmed by the largest cat study ever.
Cats have been domesticated for a much longer time than most people imagine.
Specifically, experts from the Jacques Monod Institute (France) have shown that in history, cats have been domesticated twice. And the first people to do that were the people of the Near East (Near East - a region that includes many historically unidentified countries in Southwest Asia).
Accordingly, farmers from the Near East successfully domesticated wild cats 9,000 years ago. Several thousand years later, it was the turn of the ancient Egyptians to continue this process.
"There were two times when cats were domesticated - once in the Near East, and once much later in Egypt," said Eva-Maria Geigl, lead researcher.
"The cats were then transported around the world via merchant ships. Those are the two ancestral lines of modern cats."
Cats were initially released into fields or warehouses on merchant ships to kill rats.
From a tool to kill mice to... "father of generals" of every family
Cats weren't always the lazy, squirming creatures in the house all day like today's bosses.
The cats were initially released into fields or warehouses on merchant ships to kill rats, experts say. They spend thousands of years doing that, before officially becoming human pets.
Cat bones appear in many ancient tombs.
To get the results, the team isolated the mitochondrial DNA (which is passed down from generation to generation) from more than 200 ancient cat breeds. DNA sources come from Viking tombs, Egyptian mummies, and Stone Age sites.
The results, as stated, show that cats were domesticated 9,000 years ago in the Near East. Several thousand years later, cats appeared in Europe during the Roman period and thanks to Viking ships.
It is worth noting that the tabby breed seems to have only appeared in the Middle Ages. DNA traces suggest that these are mutated genes, and only appeared in cats from western Türkiye in the 14th century.
The tabby cat is a mutant gene that only appeared in the Middle Ages.
"Very little of a cat's trait has changed since the 19th century, at least compared to a dog. Cats are a combination of many useful traits, so it doesn't need to be changed."
The study was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
- Beautiful pictures of Meerkat civets
- Image: Frog exercising
- Mother and child in the animal world
- Strange blind salamander, takes 10 years to eat a meal, 12 years to mate but can live for a century
