@conference{
author = "Krajcarz, Magdalena and Krajcarz, Maciej and Bielichová, Zora and Bulatović, Jelena and Csippán, Péter and Dimitrijević, Vesna and Марковић, Nemanja and Živaljević, Ivana and Makowiecki, Daniel and Baca, Mateusz",
year = "2023",
abstract = "Despite significant progress in paleogenomics and the increasing amount of new data on
animal domestication, we still know little about the history of cats. Until now, it was
known that only one subspecies, the Near Eastern wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), was
domesticated. The domestication area was assumed to be the Near East during the
Neolithic period, with a prominent role in ancient Egypt. From this region, the cats spread
through the Mediterranean and beyond. It has been accepted that the primary role in the
expansion of cats through northern Europe was that of the Roman legions. However, we
found that cats that carried mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) haplotypes of wildcats from the
Near East were present in Central Europe already in the Neolithic, much before Roman
times. This indicates that the cats' route from the domestication centers to Central
Europe might have been more complex than previously thought and could have been
related to the Neolithic expansion. Our new results reveal the presence of the mtDNA
haplotypes of the Near Eastern wildcats in Poland even in the pre-Neolithic period. This
may suggest that the Near Eastern wildcats could spread across Europe independently of
the expansion of farming, and, in consequence, the natural range of the Near Eastern
wildcat could have been much broader than previously assumed. To understand how and
when domestic cats appeared in Central Europe, we perform a target enrichment of ca.
57,000 genomic SNPs. We believe that it will allow us to finally determine whether the
appearance of the Near Eastern wildcat mtDNA in Central Europe was a natural admixture
between two subspecies or was human-mediated dispersal of tamed/domesticated cats.
The study is supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, grant no.
2019/35/B/HS3/02923.",
publisher = "Estonian National Museum, Tartu, Estonia",
journal = "Book of Abstracts : 10th Meeting of the International Society for Biomolecular Archaeology (ISBA) New Horizons in Biomolecular Archaeology",
title = "Tracing the early spread of domestic cat in Central Europe: Human-mediated dispersal or natural introgression?",
pages = "164",
url = "https://hdl.handle.net/21.15107/rcub_rai_1377"
}