Ancient DNA reveals China’s first ‘pet’ cat wasn’t the house cat

The house cat (Felis catus) slunk into China in the eighth century. But long before that, the ancient Chinese were by no means catless.

A new genetic analysis offers evidence that between 5,400 and 1,900 years ago, it was the leopard cat (Prionailurus bengalensis) that pounced on the rats and mice of ancient China, researchers report November 27 in Cell Genomics. The finding offers hints as to why some animals end up in our homes and hearts, while others stay wild and free.

Modern house cats are descendants of the African wildcat (Felis lybica). Humans must have brought them to China, “but there were a lot of debates on when exactly this happened,” says He Yu, a paleogeneticist from Peking University in China. Art and literature dating back to a few centuries B.C. talks about “cats” and even includes images of cats. “But there were also people arguing this cat may not be the domestic cat that we assume today,” Yu says.

Yu and her colleagues examined the mitochondrial DNA — passed down only from the mother’s side — from the bones of 22 cats found in human settlements, dating from around 5,400 years ago during the Neolithic to as recent as the 20th century. The earliest of the house cats date to A.D. 730 during China’s Tang Dynasty, when the feline species could have arrived via the Silk Road. All the house cat remains had mitochondrial DNA that points to origins in the Middle East, making the mothers of those cats closely related to modern African wildcats from the same region.

DNA also provided clues to what that earliest cat looked like, Yu says. Most likely, it had short fur and at least some white markings. Much like people today, those living during the Tang Dynasty were also into cat pictures, and their paintings confirm that white cats or cats with white markings were popular — 85 percent of depicted cats had some white.

But when the scientists looked at samples from before A.D. 200, the mitochondrial DNA didn’t belong to house cats. It belonged to leopard cats — another cat local to China. It’s unlikely these were as cuddly as house cats. “The leopard cats may have been more of what we call exploiters,” living near humans but not in their homes, says Kathryn Lord, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School based in Worcester, who was not involved in the study.

This finding matches archaeological remains from the Han Dynasty. A shallow bowl from around 168 B.C. has an image of a cat, but instead of stripes or patches, the cat is depicted with spots and a long, striped tail — much like a leopard cat, Yu notes.

The leopard cat disappeared from human sites after the Han Dynasty, around the third century A.D. It was a “chaotic period in Chinese history,” with wars and economic and population declines, Yu says. Once stability and food abundance returned, along with small, tasty rodents in need of a predator, the leopard cat could have come back. But by then, Yu notes, the domestic cat had arrived. It filled the niche and won by a whisker because it was also more tame.

But the leopard cat may not stay out of favor forever. Not only is it one parent in the now popular Bengal cat breed, but ecologists are also finding wild leopard cats living in modern Chinese suburbs, Yu notes. “A lot of leopard cats are living very close to humans even just in the suburbs in Beijing,” she says. People — and their trash and rodents — are still a draw.

The tale of two felines offers insight into why some animals end up in domestic relationships with people, while others don’t, says Elinor Karlsson, also at the Chan Medical School. “This paper shows that adapting to human environments is an evolutionary process like everything else,” she says. Leopard cats exploited human environments when it worked for them and faded back into the forest when it didn’t. “It’s just amazing that animals can do this, and it’s not humans making it happen,” she says. “We’re just shaping the world.”