The cat diaspora out of Africa

Beloved as household companions, yet readily reverting to a feral existence, domestic cats differ in very few traits—length of intestines, size of the brain, and a few behavioral changes—from their wildcat ancestors, earning them the sobriquet “semidomesticated” (1). Where and when this semidomestication occurred, however, has long been debated. On page 904 of this issue, De Martino et al. (2) report analyses of ancient and modern nuclear DNA that go a long way to answering these questions, suggesting that domestic cats originated in northern Africa and traveled from there to Europe and southwestern Asia in the past several thousand years.