Small cat bones recovered from Neolithic and later Chinese sites had long been assumed to belong to early domestic cats, on the reasonable logic that cats and grain stores go together. A team led from the School of Life Sciences at Peking University tested the assumption with ancient DNA, analysing mitochondrial and nuclear material from 22 ancient feline individuals excavated at 14 archaeological sites and spanning from around 5,400 years ago to the twentieth century.
The identification overturns the assumption. Before about AD 220, every feline found near human settlements was a native leopard cat, not a domestic cat. These animals lived around farming communities from the Late Neolithic to the end of the Eastern Han, feeding on the abundant prey such settlements attract. That amounts to roughly 3,500 years of human and leopard cat coexistence without domestication, a commensal relationship rather than a domestic one.
Domestic cats, which descend from Near Eastern African wildcats, arrived considerably later. The earliest confirmed remains date to AD 706 to 883 and come from the Tongwan City site in Shaanxi, with maternal lineages linking them to those wildcats. Genome reconstruction suggests this individual had short fur and probably white or white-spotted colouring. Contemporaneous cats from Kazakhstan share identical genetic signatures, supporting arrival through Silk Road trade.
Published in Cell Genomics, the study provides the first detailed genetic timeline for cats in China and incidentally illustrates how readily morphological similarity misleads in zooarchaeology. It also adds animals to the list of things the Silk Road carried, alongside goods and ideas, with a date of arrival now tied to a specific archaeological context rather than inferred from textual sources.