Their findings are published on 22 January 2025 in the journal called PLOS ONE.
The cat is the most common and popular domestic animal in the world today, with over 500 million individuals. All of today’s domestic cats descend from the African and Near Eastern version of the wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica). According to work published in 2004, humans and cats first started to form a close relationship in the Near East way back from 9000 to 7000 BC, following the birth of agriculture.
In 2001, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing discovered cat bones in agricultural settlements located in northern China (Shaanxi province) dating from around 3500 BC. Was this evidence of some relationship between small Chinese cats and humans in the fourth smillennium BC in China? Or was it the result of the arrival in China of the first domestic cats coming from the Near East? There was no way of deciding between these two hypotheses without identifying the species to which the bones rightly belonged. Although there are no less than four different forms of small cat in China, the subspecies from which modern cats are descendants (Felis silvestris lybica) has never been recorded there.
Side view of a domestic cat skull from the Neolithic site of Wuzhuangguoliang (Shaanxi, 3200-2800 BC).
Credit: © J.-D. Vigne, CNRS/MNHN
To try to settle the question, a collaboration of scientists principally from CNRS, the French Natural History Museum (MNHN), the University of Aberdeen, the Chinese Academy of Social Science and the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology undertook a geometric morphometric analysis, which, in the absence of any ancient DNA, is the only way of differentiating the bones of such small cats, which have very similar morphologies whose differences are often imperceptible using any conventional techniques. The scientists analyzed the mandibles of five cats from Shaanxi and Henan dating back from 3500 to 2900 BC. Their work clearly determined that the bones all belonged to the leopard (Prionailurus bengalensis). Still very widespread in Eastern Asia today, this wildcat, which is a distant relation of the western wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), is well-known for its propensity to frequent areas which have a strong human presence. Just as in the Near East and Egypt, leopard cats were probably attracted into Chinese settlements by the proliferation of rodents who took advantage of the grain stores there.
These conclusions show that a process comparable to the one that took place in the Near East and in Egypt developed independently in China following the birth of agriculture back in the eighth millennium BC. In China it was the leopard cat (P. bengalensis) and not the western wildcat (F. silvestris) which started to form a relationship with humans. Cat domestication was, at least in three regions of the world, therefore closely connected to the beginnings of true agriculture.
Nevertheless, domestic cats in China today have not descended from the leopard cat but rather from its relation F. silvestris lybica. The latter therefore replaced the leopard cat in Chinese settlements after the end of the Neolithic. Did it perhaps arrive in China with the opening of the Silk Road, when the Roman and Han empires began to establish tenuous links between East and West? This is the next question which will need to be answered.
The above post is reprinted from materials provided by CNRS. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
Journal Reference:
Jean-Denis Vigne, Allowen Evin, Thomas Cucchi, Lingling Dai, Chong Yu, Songmei Hu, Nicolas Soulages, Weilin Wang, Zhouyong Sun, Jiangtao Gao, Keith Dobney, Jing Yuan. Earliest “Domestic” Cats in China Identified as Leopard Cat (Prionailurus bengalensis). PLOS ONE, 2016; 11 (1): e0147295 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147295