A bone fragment. A burnt tooth. A single strand of ancient genetic code drawn from a Neolithic jawbone buried eight thousand years beneath the plains of Turkey. For decades, discoveries like these seemed to tell scientists a clear and tidy story about how cats first arrived in Europe, riding alongside humanity’s earliest farming communities as they spread westward from the Near East. That story, it turns out, was spectacularly wrong.
Continue reading The Great Cat Myth Busted: Why Farmers Didn’t Bring Cats to Europe