Nearly 10,000 years ago, humans who settled in the Fertile Crescent, the areas of the Middle East around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, made the first shift from hunter-gatherers to farmers.
They developed close ties with the rodent-eating cats that conveniently served as ancient pest control in society’s earliest civilizations.
A new study from the University of Missouri (USA) finds that this lifestyle transition to humans was the catalyst that triggered the world’s first domestication of cats, and when humans began to travel the world, they took their new feline friends along with them. they. The research was published in the journal Heredity.
Leslie A. Lyons, a feline geneticist and professor of comparative medicine at the University of Missouri College of Veterinary Medicine, collected and analyzed DNA from cats in and around the Fertile Crescent area, as well as throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. , comparing about 200 different genetic markers.
Read more at ISTOÉ
