By Hannah MillingtonShareNewsweek is a Trust Project memberIt seems that domestic cats were not the first felines to live with humans, a study undertaken in China has revealed.
In fact, the cats we are most familiar with they only arrived in the region via the Silk Road around 700 CE, whereas an unrelated species of small cat—the leopard cat—lived in human settlements in the country for around 3,500 years before this.
This is the discovery of international researchers who traced the history of cats living with humans and the arrival of domestic cats in East Asia by analyzing 22 small feline bones excavated from China spanning 5,000 years.
Ancient DNA revealed leopard cats appeared in human-derived environments at least 5,400 years ago and persisted until 150CE.
...“Phylogenetic analysis of mitochondrial genomes from 22 ancient specimens, combined with radiocarbon dating, revealed that six of the seven feline remains found in Chinese archaeological sites were leopard cats,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
They cited evidence suggesting that leopard cats may have entered a commensal relationship with humans in ancient China by preying on small rodents in human-modified environments since the Neolithic period.
People may have also welcomed ‘wild cats’ on their farms for pest control, while leopard cats are reflected in ancient Chinese art depicting felines with round spots.
Feeding on resources from human environments would have also benefited the leopard cats, potentially initiating the process of domestication.
A centuries-long gap then appeared to exist between these leopard cats and the emergence of domestic cats, the study found.
“Interestingly, the disappearance of leopard cats coincides with the turbulent era following the Han Dynasty’s collapse and preceding the Tang Dynasty’s rise. This period experienced colder, drier conditions, declining agricultural yields, social unrest and a population contraction lasting 400 years,” said the authors.
The earliest known domestic cat in China (706–883 CE), reconstructed as a fully or partially white cat, was identified in Shaanxi during the Tang Dynasty, according to the research.
...Genomic analysis combining 130 modern and ancient Eurasian cat specimens suggested an origin of Chinese domestic cats from the Levant—the historic term for the region along the eastern Mediterranean—and a merchant-mediated dispersal via the network of ancient trade routes the Silk Road.
Historical records hint that domestic cats were regarded as exotic pets and were likely kept among the ancient Chinese elite, reflecting their relatively recent introduction to China, according to the team.
While both leopard cats and domestic cats once independently inhabited ancient human settlements in China, they followed different sociocultural paths with only domestic cats becoming fully domesticated and globally introduced.
“A commonly held viewpoint is that domestic cats were present in China as early as the Han Dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE). However, all small felid remains from before or during the Han era in our dataset, including FS24, the specimen used to support the Han-origin hypothesis from the capital Chan’an, were genetically identified as not F. catus [the domestic cat] according to our ancient DNA analysis,” the researchers wrote in the paper.
“The earliest domestic cat found in Central Asia does not predate the Tang Dynasty in China either. Taken together, these results converged on the conclusion that domestic cats arrived in East Eurasia and China relatively recently.”
Newsweek has reached out to the researchers for additional comment.
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Reference
Han, Y., Hu, S., Liu, K., Xu, X., Li, Z., Doherty, S., Jamieson, A. E., Manin, A., Martins, S. G., Yang, M., Yu, C., Wang, J., Wu, Z., Chen, C., Han, S., Lu, D., Peng, L., Wu, X., Fan, W., Cai, Q., … Luo, S.-J. (2026). The late arrival of domestic cats in China via the Silk Road after 3,500 years of human-leopard cat commensalism. Cell Genomics, 6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xgen.2025.101099
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