Friday cat blogging: they get around

Cats saw opportunity and moved in.

According to [paleogeneticist Dr. Danijela Popović], cats domesticated themselves; they were attracted to the rodents that feasted off the harvests of the first farmers. They chose us, not the other way around. Consequently, those early farmers were grateful for this helpful form of pest control. As a result, thanks to humans, cats colonized Central Europe.

The oldest archaeological evidence for cat domestication is a 9,500-year-old burial, uncovered in Cyprus in 2004, in which a Paleolithic-era human was buried with their feline pet. There is spare evidence for the spread of cats throughout Europe before the Late Middle Ages. In Europe, cat bones only became abundant in the second half of the 13th century, which implies that cats had become popular at this time.

The conventional theory is that cats started to spread throughout the Mediterranean in Antiquity, journeying with Greeks and Romans. According to the map below, they would have hopped on board Etruscan, Greek, and Phoenician vessels to get to major Mediterranean islands like Sicily by 1700 BC, landed in ancient Greece about 1400 BC, arrive in republican Rome in about 500 BC, and make it to pre-Roman Iberia by 400 BC.

After that, cats became another thing the Roman Empire exported, just like wine and soldiers. They reached Britannia in about 100 BC and Germania at about the BC/AD milestone. Cats are affirmed in Ireland only from 900 AD, and in Scotland from 500 to 800 AD. During that time, the Vikings took cats on their long voyages across Europe, helping them spread even further. [Vivid Maps]

A separate domestication apparently occurred in Egypt. The different strains interbred.

Just for the heck of it, here's a Montenegrin cat from town of Kotor, 2015. The entire coast of the Mediterranean is cat homeland.

 

Not apparently as well fed as Mio.