Don’t we just love our cats? You can trace ancestral human population migrations simply by studying cats. When humans travelled, they brought their cats with them. Therefore, if humans moved from country A to country B, we would expect that today the cat populations in countries A and B to be similar, simply because they have a recent common origin.

Cats have a total of seven genes governing the colour of their coats. So, simply by studying the frequencies of each of these traits in any given cat population you can begin to build up a picture of which populations are most similar to which other populations.

For instance, did you know that the cat population of New York is similar to the cat population of Amsterdam? New York was originally called New Amsterdam and was originally settled by the Dutch. The dutch brought their cats with them across the Atlantic. Hence the similarity in cat populations.

This week there is a new study on the domestication of cats. This time, mitochondrial DNA sequences have been used in order to examine the long-term evolutionary history of the domestic cat. In total they identify a population of five ancestors of the modern-day cat and the place where cats were domesticated was in the fertile crescent (near Iraq today).

When were cats domesticated? Seems like it was about 100,000 years ago. Now that’s a long, long time ago. Seems like have loved our cats for quite some time.