The history of cats

The house cat comes from the African wildcat, which moved in with the first farmers in the Near East about 10,000 years ago (that story comes further on, under domestication). The cat family itself is much older: it begins with Proailurus, about 30 million years ago.

The ancestors of all of today's carnivores appeared about 60 million years ago, shortly after the dinosaurs died out. Some sources say 65 million years. By about 45 to 50 million years ago the carnivores had split into two groups: a cat side, with cats, hyenas, mongooses and civets, and a dog side.

When the first true cats appeared depends on the source: somewhere between about 35 and 27 million years ago. Their closest relatives are the linsangs, small carnivores from Asia. The two families split about 32 million years ago.

Proailurus, 'before the cat', is usually seen as the first true cat. Its fossils have been found in France, Germany, Spain, Mongolia and China, among other places. Proailurus lemanensis was a bit bigger than a house cat, about 9 kg, had a long tail and spent at least part of its time in trees.

Next came Pseudaelurus, about 23 to 15 million years ago (or 20 to 8, depending on the source). It lived in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. Its group gave rise to two lines: the cats of today and the sabre-toothed cats.

Not everything that looks like a cat is one. Nimravids and barbourofelids sometimes had long canines, but they are 'false cats': their ear is built differently. South America even had a marsupial that looked like a sabre-tooth. Long sabre teeth evolved several times, separately.

The big cats came late. One of the oldest fossils of the genus Panthera, the group of the lion and the tiger, is Panthera principialis from Tanzania, about 3.7 million years old.

All of today's cats share one common ancestor. How long ago it lived differs from study to study: somewhere between about 16 and 10 million years ago. Fossils and DNA do not give quite the same dates.

The family has two subfamilies. The big cats (Pantherinae) are seven species, among them the lion and the tiger. All the other 34 species belong to the small cats (Felinae), the house cat included.

The split is about kinship, not size. The puma grows large but still counts as a small cat. And DNA says the cheetah's closest relatives are the puma and the jaguarundi.

The best-known difference is in the throat. Only the lion, tiger, leopard and jaguar truly roar. Small cats cannot roar, but they can purr: their hyoid bone in the throat is rigid, while the roarers have a more flexible one. The snow leopard does not roar, and clouded leopards neither roar nor purr.

DNA sorts the cats into eight lineages, each named after a well-known member: Panthera, bay cat, caracal, ocelot, lynx, puma, leopard cat and domestic cat. Their ancestors moved between continents at least ten times, helped by lower sea levels. Wild cats live naturally on every continent except Australia and Antarctica.

The sabre-toothed cats are not ancestors of today's cats. They were a side branch of their own that split off about 22 to 20 million years ago. So the name 'sabre-toothed tiger' is wrong: they were not tigers, and there is no evidence they had stripes. The last ones died out about 13,000 to 10,000 years ago.

The house cat (Felis catus) belongs to the genus Felis, together with six wild species, among them the European wildcat (Felis silvestris) and the African wildcat (Felis lybica). The European wildcat was the last to split off, somewhere between about 1.6 million and 600,000 years ago.

Older books treat the wildcat as one species, Felis silvestris, with the African wildcat as a subspecies. Since the new classification of 2017 they are two species. That is why texts from before 2017 often still use the name Felis silvestris lybica for the house cat's ancestor.

In 2007 a team led by Driscoll compared the DNA of 979 cats: house cats and wildcats from Europe, the Near East, Central Asia, southern Africa and China. Every house cat fell inside the Near Eastern group. They descend from at least five founding females from that region.

The African wildcat is one of the most common wild cats. It lives in almost all of Africa, except closed tropical forest, and in Asia as far as Mongolia and China. It weighs 2 to 8 kg and is less fierce than the European wildcat. That is thought to be one reason why it, and not its cousin, became the house cat's ancestor.

Some once thought the house cat came from the European wildcat, but behaviour and DNA point to the African one. The European wildcat lives mostly in broad-leaved and mixed woods, hunts alone at night, mainly for small rodents, and is almost impossible to tame. It only left a trace in the house cat by interbreeding with early cats.

A skeleton does not show whether a cat was wild or tame: the bones of wildcats and house cats look exactly alike. That is why it took DNA to work out the story of the cat.

In the Fertile Crescent, the arc of land from the Mediterranean coast through Turkey and Iraq to Iran, people and cats came close about 11,000 to 10,000 years ago. Stored grain drew mice and rats, and they drew wildcats. House mice were already living in the huts of hunter-gatherers there as early as 15,000 years ago.

So the cat came to the village by itself. Scientists call this commensal: an animal lives off people's food and waste without being kept. Dogs, mice, rats and sparrows went the same way. But unlike dogs, cats were never bred for a particular job.

The oldest sign of a bond between people and cats comes from Cyprus. At the farming village of Shillourokambos, about 9,500 years ago, a cat of about eight months was buried 40 cm from a person, in a grave with seashells and polished stones. Cyprus had no native wildcats, so people must have brought the cat by boat. Whether it was tame, nobody knows.

Older books give Egypt the credit, because cats were painted, carved and worshipped there. The story starts earlier and in the Near East, but Egypt is still a second centre. At Hierakonpolis, around 3700 BCE, a cat lived with healed broken bones, probably cared for by people for weeks.

In China things went differently. There a different wild cat, the leopard cat, lived beside farmers for thousands of years from about 5,400 years ago, but it never became a pet. Real house cats reached China much later, along the Silk Road.

The story is not finished. According to a 2025 study, the oldest 'house cats' of Europe and Anatolia were really European wildcats with some African ancestry, and the roots of our house cat lie in North Africa. That study stands next to the older Near East results, not above them. On one thing everyone agrees: all house cats descend from the African wildcat.

The travelling started early: the cat of Cyprus must have been brought to the island by boat about 9,500 years ago. But the great spread came much later, in Classical times. Cats sailed on Egyptian trade ships to catch vermin, and that is how they reached large parts of South West Asia, Africa and Europe.

You can see this in ancient DNA. An Egyptian line of cats turns up in Turkey, Jordan and Bulgaria from the 8th century BCE, and became very common between the 5th and 13th centuries CE. Cats of that line have even been found at Viking sites on the Baltic Sea.

Phoenician, Greek and Roman traders carried cats around the Mediterranean. According to a 2025 DNA study, house cats only came to Europe from North Africa about 2,000 years ago, probably with sailors, with Sardinia as a stepping stone. The Romans then took the cat north, where it was at first an exotic pet.

To the east the route was over land. Along the Silk Road, house cats reached China in the Tang dynasty. The oldest confirmed house cat there, from Tongwan City, shares its genetic signature with cats from Kazakhstan.

From the 15th century, European ships carried cats to the Americas, Australia and New Zealand to catch rats. Ship's cats and their kittens founded cat populations on every continent except Antarctica, and on hundreds of islands. The oldest cat bones in North America come from a shipwreck lost in a storm in 1559.

Some ship's cats became famous. Unsinkable Sam survived the sinking of the Bismarck in 1941, and Simon of the British ship HMS Amethyst is the only cat ever awarded the Dickin Medal. The Royal Navy banned cats from ocean-going ships in 1975.

House cats in Europe are younger than long thought. Ancient DNA from 225 cats from 97 sites shows that cats of the house cat type only turn up around the start of the Common Era; the oldest, from Sardinia, is about 2,200 years old. Older cats once taken for house cats turned out to be European wildcats with some African ancestry.

With the Vikings in Scandinavia, cats were mousers, pets and fur animals, and sometimes they were placed in the graves of important people. In the 11th century they became an ordinary domestic animal there.

In the Middle Ages many people in Western Europe kept cats as pets, and they were valued as mousers. A Dutch illustrated Book of Hours from the early 14th century shows a nun with a distaff while her white cat plays with the spool.

From the 12th century cats got a worse name. Writers such as Walter Map linked them to the devil, and enemies accused heretics and the Knights Templars of worshipping cats. These were accusations by enemies, not records of what people really did. A letter by Pope Gregory IX from 1233 is often named as the start of a hunt on cats, but it does not order anyone to kill cats.

Witch trials only became common in the 16th and 17th centuries. The first witches' cats in English stories were not black: the first to reach print was a white spotted cat called Satan. Black cats only became part of the witch picture in Victorian times. Still, in those centuries cats were killed at folk festivals in some places.

A stubborn story says that medieval people killed cats in huge numbers, so rats could spread the plague. There is no evidence for it, not in documents and not in the ground. Nor did cats stop the plague: a cat that eats an infected rat can fall ill itself. By the end of the 19th century the cat was a loved family companion again.

The history of cats in the Low Countries starts long before Ypres. A Dutch fishing boat brought up a jaw of the sabre-tooth Homotherium from the North Sea floor, about 28,000 years old, from the time when that was dry land. And the house cat came to the Low Countries with the Romans.

Ypres was a city of the cloth trade, with a large Cloth Hall as market and warehouse. At the cloth fair in Lent, live cats were thrown down from the tower of the Cloth Hall. Why, nobody knows for sure. Legends say it was to drive out evil spirits and witches, or that the cats kept in the hall against mice were no longer needed once the wool was sold.

The oldest trace is in the city accounts of 1410 to 1420, which record that cats were bought, but not why. The first certain eyewitness account is from 1590, when two cats were thrown; never more than three. In 1817 the town council abolished the custom.

In 1938 the cat feast came back, now with plush cats and no live animals. In 1955 the first big Kattenstoet followed, with floats, about 1,500 extras and Cieper, a giant tomcat 6 metres tall. Since 1991 the parade has been held every three years, on the second Sunday of May.

Today's parade shows cats in ancient Egypt, cats in proverbs and stories, cats from around the world and the time when cat and witch were condemned together. At the end a jester throws plush cats from the belfry to the crowd, and the girl who catches a plush kitten becomes cat queen. In 2024 an estimated 55,000 people came; the next parade is planned for 9 May 2027.

Dutch painting shows cats too, with love and sometimes with cruelty. Jan Steen (1626 to 1679) painted children making a cat dance, and 17th-century painters often used animals to teach a lesson about right and wrong. Later Henriette Ronner painted playful cats and Willem Witsen sketched his cat Lola.

In the 1860s many English people saw cats as scruffy, mewling rat-catchers that did not belong in a proper room. The artist and illustrator Harrison Weir (1824 to 1906) set out to change that.

In July 1871 he organised the first cat show in England, at the Crystal Palace in London. Cats were divided by breed and size and given points. The Guardian reports about 170 cats and 20,000 visitors over two days, including the first Siamese shown in Britain.

There were only five recognised breeds then. Unlike dogs, cats were never bred for a particular job, so most breeds are young. How many breeds there are now differs by source and year: somewhere between 30 and 50.

In 1887 the National Cat Club was founded, with Weir as its first president. The club started the first studbook for cats. Weir himself resigned in 1890 and later complained that fanciers cared more about medals than about the welfare of cats.

Weir's book Our Cats and All About Them (1889) is the first book about pedigree cats. Queen Victoria took in two blue Persians, which encouraged others. In 1949 the French, Belgian and Italian breed associations founded the International Feline Federation, FIFe, in France.

In 1758 Linnaeus gave the house cat its scientific name, Felis catus. He described it from a cat with a marbled tabby coat, not from the wild type. The European wildcat was named Felis silvestris in 1777 or 1778, and the African wildcat Felis lybica in 1780.

Researchers were already measuring the skulls of cat mummies in the 19th century. In 1952 Morrison-Scott measured about 190 skulls from Giza. He found one form, close to the African wildcat, apart from a few large jungle cats.

Then DNA took over. In 2004 Vigne described the cat grave on Cyprus, in 2007 Driscoll placed the start of the house cat in the Near East, and in 2017 Ottoni and colleagues showed that cats from both the Near East and Egypt contributed. In 2025 one study put the roots of our cats in North Africa, and another showed that China's early farm cats were leopard cats.

In 2014 the full genome of a cat was mapped: that of Cinnamon, an Abyssinian. Compared with wildcats there were few places where the cat had clearly changed, fewer than in dogs. The clearest differences are in genes for the brain, memory and reward. The researchers think cats mainly became tamer.

The original coat pattern is the striped tabby. The blotched tabby, with broad swirls, is a mutation that only turns up after the Middle Ages began and is now found in about 80 percent of cats. This shows that people only started breeding cats for looks late: most breeds are younger than 150 years.

DNA tests for cats are now cheap and common. A 2022 study tested 11,036 cats, the largest DNA study of house cats so far. Other research showed that cats worldwide form one big population, with the most variety around the eastern Mediterranean, just where the story of the house cat began.

In September 2026 a new cat species was reported from Bolivia, the first in more than 100 years. It is smaller than a house cat, lives in rainforest and is locally known as the tilcayo cat. DNA places it apart from the other Leopardus cats.

Many wild cats are struggling. They lose their habitat and are hunted for their fur or as a threat to livestock. There is good news too: the Iberian lynx has recovered strongly and in June 2024 moved from Endangered to Vulnerable.

In Scotland the wildcat has nearly vanished. Since June 2023 cats bred in captivity have been released in the Cairngorms National Park, the first such release in Britain. In France the wildcat turned up again in the Bauges Massif in 2022 after about a century. Worldwide the wildcat is not counted as threatened, but the IUCN rates the European wildcat as largely depleted.

House cats are getting rules too. In the Brussels-Capital Region every cat born after 1 January 2018 must be sterilised before six months old, and since 1 March 2023 every cat must be registered by 12 weeks. Wallonia also requires sterilisation. By early 2026 about 60,000 cats had been sterilised in Brussels since 2018.

Cats have a downside too. Feral cats on islands are held responsible for at least 14 percent of all bird, mammal and reptile extinctions in the world. That figure is about islands, not about Europe.