Cats were domesticated in North Africa, but spread to Europe only about 2,000 years ago. Earlier reports of “house” cats were ...

Cats didn’t become house pets because humans needed them. They didn’t herd animals, pull carts, or guard property.

In the United States, cats are the most popular house pet, with about 90 million domesticated cats slinking around 34 percent of U.S. homes. Wikipedia On any of the surprising number of Web sites ...

The origins of domestic cats — centuries before they conquered the world’s sofas and internet memes — have long been murky. Now, ancient DNA is helping to fill in the blanks, and the findings shake up ...

Domestic cats first joined European communities around 2,000 years ago, during the age of Roman power, not in deep prehistory.

Ancient DNA is rewriting the origin story of the cat curled on the sofa. Long before the familiar house cat padded into ...

In this new study, a team analyzed the genomes of 70 ancient cats, dating back over the last 11,000 years (from about 9000 BCE to 19th century CE). The genomes were taken from bones found in ...

The modern house cat reached China in the 8th century. Before that, another cat — the leopard cat — hunted the rodents in ancient Chinese settlements.