The dispersal of domestic cats from Northern Africa and their introduction to Europe over the last two millennia

2025 · doi:10.1101/2025.03.28.645893
preprint OA: gold CC-BY-NC-4.0
📄 Open PDF Full text JSON View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-07, 2026-07-15 ⓘ

Analyzing 87 ancient and modern cat genomes, this study shows domestic cats were introduced to Europe from North Africa within the last 2,000 years, not with Neolithic farmers.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-07, 2026-07-15 · read from full text ⓘ

This paper used analyses of 87 ancient and modern domestic cat genomes to investigate where domestic cats originated and when and how they dispersed into Europe. The authors report that domestic cats did not spread to Europe with Neolithic farmers, as previously proposed, and instead suggest introductions to Europe occurred within the last 2,000 years, most likely originating from North Africa. They also found evidence of an earlier 1st millennium BCE introduction of wildcats from Northwest Africa that contributed to the present-day Sardinian wild cat population. The study’s key limitation is that it infers historical dispersal routes and timings from genetic data, which may be sensitive to sampling and interpretive assumptions; the paper provides no competing interests. The paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

The domestic cat ( Felis catus ) descends from the African wildcat subspecies Felis lybica lybica . Its global distribution alongside humans testifies to its successful adaptation to anthropogenic environments. Uncertainty remains regarding whether domestic cats originated in the Levant, Egypt or elsewhere in its natural range, and on the timing and circumstances of their dispersal into Europe. By analysing 87 ancient and modern cat genomes, we demonstrate that domestic cats did not spread to Europe with Neolithic farmers, as previously thought. Conversely, our results suggest that they were introduced to Europe over the last 2,000 years, most likely from North Africa. We also demonstrate that a separate earlier (1st millennium BCE) introduction of wildcats from Northwest Africa originated the present-day wild population in Sardinia.
Full text 1,701 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · click to expand
The dispersal of domestic cats from Northern Africa and their introduction to Europe over the last two millennia Abstract The domestic cat (Felis catus) descends from the African wildcat subspecies Felis lybica lybica. Its global distribution alongside humans testifies to its successful adaptation to anthropogenic environments. Uncertainty remains regarding whether domestic cats originated in the Levant, Egypt or elsewhere in its natural range, and on the timing and circumstances of their dispersal into Europe. By analysing 87 ancient and modern cat genomes, we demonstrate that domestic cats did not spread to Europe with Neolithic farmers, as previously thought. Conversely, our results suggest that they were introduced to Europe over the last 2,000 years, most likely from North Africa. We also demonstrate that a separate earlier (1st millennium BCE) introduction of wildcats from Northwest Africa originated the present-day wild population in Sardinia. Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Footnotes ↵† Deceased during the course of this study Subject Area - Biochemistry (17697) - Bioengineering (13894) - Bioinformatics (41951) - Biophysics (21455) - Cancer Biology (18593) - Cell Biology (25509) - Clinical Trials (138) - Developmental Biology (13380) - Ecology (19903) - Epidemiology (2067) - Evolutionary Biology (24322) - Genetics (15611) - Genomics (22509) - Immunology (17737) - Microbiology (40398) - Molecular Biology (17183) - Neuroscience (88619) - Paleontology (667) - Pathology (2833) - Pharmacology and Toxicology (4825) - Physiology (7644) - Plant Biology (15158) - Synthetic Biology (4296) - Systems Biology (9825) - Zoology (2271)

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2025) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00
unpaywall
last seen: 2026-05-21T02:00:01.467718+00:00
License: CC-BY-NC-4.0