Instead, people more or less allowed cats to domesticate themselves. “It’s not that humans took some cats and put them inside cages,” he says. “This is probably how the first encounter between humans and cats occurred,” says study coauthor Claudio Ottoni of the University of Leuven.
Cats likely followed the rodent populations and, in turn, frequently approached the human settlements. Mice and rats were attracted to crops and other agricultural byproducts being produced by human civilizations. (See little-known small cats in “ Out of the Shadows, the Wildcats You’ve Never Seen.”) The cats likely started hanging around farming communities in the Fertile Crescent about 8,000 years ago, where they settled into a mutually beneficial relationship as humans’ rodent patrol.
The earlier ancestors of today’s domestic cats spread from southwest Asia and into Europe as early as 4400 B.C.
