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When the first farmers came to Europe from the Middle East around 7,000 years ago, they brought goats, sheep, cattle and dogs with them.
But another four-legged friend had smuggled into their luggage: the black cat or African wildcat,
Felis silvestris lybica.
All domesticated cats are descended from this species.
She joined farmers in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago.
Because there were lots of delicious rats and mice around.
The farmers, on the other hand, were happy that the cats kept the annoying rodents away from their bodies and from their grain.
Felis silvestris lybica still lives today in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula
Source: Getty Images / Westend61
Since then, the kitties have become our loyal companions.
Scientists around the world are trying to clarify exactly what coexistence looked like and how domestication took place.
An international research team led by the Polish Nicolaus Copernicus University found further answers to the outstanding questions.
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To do this, they examined the bones of six Neolithic cats that they had found in the Żarska Cave in southern Poland.
The bones came from the time between 3,600 and 2,300 BC, making them one of the oldest remains of the ancestors of our domestic cats in Central Europe.
The team of archaeologists, evolutionary biologists, geologists and paleontologists analyzed the nitrogen and carbon isotopes in the bones.
The fertilization of fields influences the isotope content in the plants.
This is transmitted to the animals that eat these plants and further to the next living beings in the food chain.
Using the isotopes, the researchers were able to determine what the cats from the Middle East had eaten - did they eat more of the food that humans had grown or did they mainly hunt mice themselves?
The scientists then compared the values with those of humans and their dogs from that time, with the native European wildcats and other animals that also lived in the area at the time.
Location of the cat fossils in the Żarska cave
Source: Michał Wojenka / Magdalena Krajca
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The result was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: The isotope values of the dogs showed that they mainly ate man-made food.
So they were already closely tied to us.
The values of the immigrant cats, on the other hand, showed that although they also hunted rodents from the human environment, wild animals were also part of their menu.
From this the researchers concluded:
Native to the Middle East, the cats were not yet fully domesticated, but rather independent.
“The animals were not synanthropic, not fully adapted to humans and their habitat, but lived - in contrast to the dogs at this time - 'opportunistically'.
If there was no food in the wild, which they had to share with the native wild cats, there was also allowed to be food from human proximity, ”explains Hervé Bocherens from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen in a press release .
This is how idyllic the geologist involved in the study, Maciej T. Krajcarz, imagines the life of the blackcats who have immigrated to Poland to be
Source: Maciej T. Krajcarz
The fact that the ancestors of our house tigers in Neolithic Poland still lived largely wild and had little contact with humans is also shown by the fact that their isotope values largely matched those of the native wild cats.
So the two had a similar prey scheme and shared an ecological niche.
So there was actually a direct food competition between the two forms, which, however, apparently did not lead to the displacement of one or the other cat due to the large supply.
Hervé Bocherens, professor of biogeology at the University of Tübingen
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In addition, the European wildcat probably lived more in the forest, while the black cat preferred open terrain, as it was used to from its home in the Middle East.
This article was first published in September 2020.