Humans
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No one wants to live in a world without cats, but for a period of about 600 years, this was the sad reality for the people of ancient China – until the Silk Road brought them their first domestic feline about 1,300 years ago. Prior to this miserable cat-less hiatus, a very different type of kitty had lived in Chinese homes for millennia, with the first of these pets appearing during the Neolithic period.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.By analyzing the remains of 22 cats found at 14 different ancient sites across China, researchers have revealed that leopard cats began living alongside humans around 5,400 years ago and continued to provide companionship for 3,500 years. A type of wildcat native to Asia, the leopard cat is about the size of a housecat but rocks a leopard-print coat, and probably gained popularity due to its hunger for vermin.
However, from about 150 CE onwards, leopard cats totally disappear from the archaeological record. According to the study authors, this may reflect the social and economic upheaval that gripped China following the collapse of the Han Dynasty, when a lack of abundance resulted in fewer rodents hanging around human dwellings, causing the leopard cats to abandon their two-legged companions. This mirrors the disappearance of black rats in Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire, with the animals only returning several centuries later during a period of greater stability.
For six centuries after the Han Dynasty ended, the people of China had to deal with a cat-shaped hole in their lives, yet that all changed in 730 CE when the earliest known domestic cat suddenly showed up in the Silk Road hub of Tongwan City. Analyzing the specimen’s genome, the study authors found that it is related to other cats in the Levant and Central Asia, indicating that it was likely brought to China by Silk Road merchants.
It’s also exactly at this time that cats re-entered Chinese culture, with depictions of domestic felines beginning to appear on tombs during the Tang Dynasty, which lasted from the seventh to the 10th centuries CE.
Digging deeper into the genome of this first cat, the researchers were able to reconstruct certain elements of its appearance, and describe it as “either an all-white cat or a mackerel tabby with white markings.” Noting that 85 percent of cats in historical Chinese paintings are white, they go on to speculate that light coloration may have been favored by ancient Chinese elites.
Summing up the history of human-feline relations in the Far East, the study authors write that “domestic cats became fully domesticated and globally distributed, whereas human-leopard cat commensalism ended, and leopard cats returned to their natural habitats.”
The study is published in the journal Cell Genomics.
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