The earliest domestic cat on the Silk Road

Scientific Reports. 2020. Vol. 10. No. 11241. P. 1–12.

Haruda A., Ventresca Miller A., Tazhekeev A., Bilalov S., Haerke H. G., Arzhantseva I.

We present the earliest evidence for domestic cat (Felis catus L., 1758) from Kazakhstan, found
as a well preserved skeleton with extensive osteological pathologies dating to 775–940 cal CE
from the early medieval city of Dzhankent, Kazakhstan. This urban settlement was located on the
intersection of the northern Silk Road route which linked the cities of Khorezm in the south to the
trading settlements in the Volga region to the north and was known in the tenth century CE as the
capital of the nomad Oghuz. The presence of this domestic cat, presented here as an osteobiography
using a combination of zooarchaeological, genetic, and isotopic data, provides proxy evidence for a
fundamental shift in the nature of human-animal relationships within a previously pastoral region.
This illustrates the broader social, cultural, and economic changes occurring within the context of
rapid urbanisation during the early medieval period along the Silk Road.

Keywords: urbanization, Silk Road, history of Kazakhstan, Dzhankent, ancient DNA, domestic cat