Domestic cats the world over can trace their ancestry back to North African wildcats that lived around 2,000 years ago. It was from these feral felines that the very first domestic cats were produced, yet their cuteness and companionship were so coveted by humans that within a few decades they had spread to all corners of the Roman Empire.

Previously, it was thought that cats had been domesticated during Neolithic times in the Levant. Support for this theory came from the discovery of a 7,500-year-old burial in Cyprus containing a human and a cat, while mitochondrial DNA from 6,000-year-old felines in Türkiye indicated that early domestic cats may have spread from Anatolia to Europe alongside early agriculturalists.