Viking cats: Travelling the high seas helped felines conquer the world

From Internet Memes to stalking the corridors of power,cats have virtually taken over the world — and now a new study has given us some insight into the beginnings of our furry friends' global spread.

A study into ancient feline DNA found the emergence of agriculture and boat travel were catalysts — pun intended — for the domestication and proliferation of house cats.

The researchers even found evidence of one specific lineage at an ancient Viking site.

The large-scale study, which was presented at the International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology at Oxford University and reported by the journal Nature, was the first of its kind.

Thanks to a 9,500-year-old human burial from Cyprus that also contained the remains of a cat, we know that some form of relationship between cats and humans stretches back at least this far.

But as Eva-Marie Geigl of Institut Jacques Monod, one of the researchers, said, we know little else about how cats were domesticated.

"We don't know the history of ancient cats. We do not know their origin, we don't know how their dispersal occurred," she told Nature.

So Dr Geigl, with colleagues Claudio Ottoni and Thierry Grange, examined the DNA of more than 200 cats that lived between 15,000 and 300 years ago.

The researchers found the population of cats of a particular mitochondrial lineage grew in two distinct waves, first coinciding with early farming communities in the Middle East, some 12,000 years ago, and their spread to the eastern Mediterranean.

With the emergence of agriculture would have come the need to store grains, and with grains would have come rodents — and wild cats.

The researchers suggest the early farmers may have tamed the cats after recognising their potential use for rodent control.

'We just need the money': Ancient cat research lacks funding

Then, thousands of years later, this happened again — the researchers found a mitochondrial lineage seen in Egyptian cat mummies spread to Bulgaria, Turkey and sub-Saharan Africa.

This particular lineage was also found at a Viking site in Germany from between the 8th and 11th centuries.

Dr Geigl said these sea-farers may also have used the cats for rodent control — subsequently contributing to their global spread.

But despite these findings, there is still relatively little known about the history of house cats, particularly compared to dogs.

One reason for this is that funding for research into ancient cats is scant, but Dr Geigl told Nature she hoped to expand on the findings and sequence more DNA.

"We can do it, too. We just need the money," she said.