OUT OF AFRICA, KITTY-STYLE PART 1

AAAS SCIENCE, NOVEMBER 2025, DISPLAYS A FASCINATING cover blurb belying that our cat pals—as you might guess—got here in their own good time. 

Here in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow are tidbits gleaned from the issue’s two articles, Jonathan B. Losos’ “The Cat Diaspora Out Of Africa” and “The Dispersal of Domestic Cats from North Africa to Europe around 2000 Years Ago,” by M. De Martino et al.

Long-Debated “Semidomestication.” Jonathan B. Losos begins, “Beloved as household companions, yet readily reverting to a feral existence, domestic cats differ in very few traits—length of intestines, size of the brain, and a few behavioral changes—from their wildcat ancestors, earning them the sobriquet ‘semidomesticated.’ ”

From the onset, I sense that Losos knows his cats. I appreciate this term “semidomesticated,” and so would backyard feral Miss Hissy Fit.

“Where and when this semidomestication occurred, however, has long been debated,” Losos observes. He continues, “By the time of Thutmose III (around 3500 years ago), Felis catus (the domestic cat) lived as a household pet in Ancient Egypt…. But is Egypt where domestication occurred (an “out-of-Africa” hypothesis), or did it happen earlier and somewhere else?”

A wall painting from the tomb of Ipuy at Deir el-Medina. Ipuy has a small kitten sitting on his lap whilst a cat sits under his wife’s chair. Image from Nile Magazine via University College London.  

6000 Years Ago? 8000 Years Ago? 10,000 Years Ago? Losos recounts, “A handful of archaeological finds of cat bones from Egypt about 6000 years ago, from Israel 2000 years before that, and from Cyprus yet another 2000 years earlier suggest that the process could have begun as much as 10,000 years ago. The ancient Israeli and Cypriot findings have given rise to the hypothesis that cat domestication began in western Asia along the eastern Mediterranean in an area sometimes referred to as the Levant.”

The Levant? Or Northern Africa? Losos cites, “… De Martino et al. report analyses of ancient and modern nuclear DNA that go a long way to answering these questions, suggesting that domestic cats originated in northern Africa and traveled from there to Europe and southwestern Asia in the past several thousand years.”

It’s a challenging analysis: Losos observes, “Evaluating these archaeological finds is difficult because the skeletons of domestic cats and wildcats (Felis silvestris) are indistinguishable (note that ‘wildcat’ refers to the species F. silvestris and not to any ‘wild cat’). Moreover, the kittens of some wildcats are easily tamed. In other words, an archaeological cat found in a domestic setting is not necessarily a domestic cat.”

Tomorrow in Part 2, Losos describes modern evidence as well as other data based on archaeological finds. We and kitties wait intently. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025