Strangers at the Gate: How Leopard Cats, Not House Cats, Shared Early Chinese Homes

The Cat That Wasn’t There

Archaeologists have long suspected that cats padded into ancient Chinese life early and quietly, weaving themselves into the rhythms of farming villages just as they did in the Fertile Crescent. A few small bones from Neolithic fields seemed to support that narrative. But ancient DNA is adept at rearranging tidy stories, and in this case, it overturned the entire plot.

A collaborative research team led by Luo Shujin has shown,¹ with genomic precision, that the cats living among China’s earliest agriculturalists were not Felis catus at all. For more than three millennia, the feline partners of early farmers were leopard cats, Prionailurus bengalensis, a small, spotted wild species native to East and Southeast Asia.

Ancient DNA reveals 3,500 years of human–leopard cat coexistence and the arrival of domestic cats in the Tang dynasty. Credit: Cell Genomics (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.xgen.2025.101099

The animals that would eventually curl on kang-style brick beds, appear in Tang poetry, and populate silk paintings arrived startlingly late by global standards. Domestic cats, descendants of Near Eastern wildcats (Felis lybica), did not enter China until the Tang dynasty. And when they did, it appears they traveled in caravans, crossing the deserts and oasis towns of the Silk Road.

As Dr. Marina Velasco, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Barcelona, puts it:

“The story of cats in China is not a slow domestic drift but a tale of replacement, interruption, and long-distance movement that mirrors the continent’s own upheavals.”