Cats are one of the most popular pets in the world, but the discovery of the first person to have them as a pet has been a matter of disagreement among some scientists and researchers, and this has been tracked by a new study from the University of the Missouri, USA, explaining that the issue is related to a region that includes “Arab countries”.
The study states that “the history of the first domesticated cats dates back 12,000 years to the Fertile Crescent region of the Mediterranean Basin, particularly near modern Iraq.”
Cats were kept as pets by peasant farmers, with civilizations switching from hunting to farming between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago, before the ancient Egyptians, who were believed to be the first to keep them as pets.
Scientists from the University of Missouri said: “Humans were initially given pets in the Fertile Crescent region, particularly in the Middle Eastern regions surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to use them (cats) to control parasites in their new settlements”, according to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”.
The new study found that “the major lifestyle change for humans was the catalyst that sparked the world’s first use of cats as pets, but the link between them was established, once humans started traveling the world and brought new feline friends with them.”
And “unlike horses and cattle, whose domestication is due to different events, cats appear to be the only animals to be domesticated through a single event and place,” according to the study.
The Fertile Crescent is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, covering Iraq and the Levant, along with the northern region of Kuwait, the southeastern part of Turkey, and western part of Iran.
Thousands of years ago the ancient Sumerians – the oldest known civilization of ancient Mesopotamia – should have been the world’s first human civilization. 10,000 years ago, this group lived a sedentary life.
For the new study, the researchers collected samples from more than 1,000 random cats of mostly Eurasian ancestry, along with 4 African wildcats and 10 domestic and European wildcat hybrids. Then the team compared nearly 200 different genetic markers.
The results showed that the origins of the “domestic cats” came in the eastern Mediterranean basin, then spread to nearby islands and traveled south across the Levant coast to the Nile Valley.
According to the study published in the journal Nature, this movement of cats follows the same migration pattern as ancient humans. And as soon as humans started spreading from the region located in the Fertile Crescent, cats started making their way across the globe, according to Sky News Arabia.
The cats migrated to Europe and east of the Fertile Crescent, along with agricultural development and trade. From Europe, the cats sailed to the Americas.
