They weren’t. So probably not the answer you were looking for. But a recent study, that is really just expanding on what other studies have suggested, cats were never truly domesticated.
The study, published in 2017, titled: The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world, argues that cat DNA has changed very little over the millennia, with one distinct exception, the coloring pattern of the tabby. Even this exception though didn’t occur until the Middle Ages.
This wasn’t the first study that showed that basic idea. In 2013, another study titled The tiger genome and comparative analysis with lion and snow leopard genomes discovered that tigers and house cats shared 95.6% of the same DNA. This study said that they had diverged almost 11 million years ago.
Going back to the 2017 study though, what it related was that it was probably around 8,000 years ago that the cat started hanging around farming communities, and from there, got closer to humans because food was easier to get to. Basically, it was a mutually beneficial relationship, because with farming communities, you have more rodents, which gives cats an easy meal, thus ridding the farmers of the pest.
From there, the cat really spread, seemingly following maritime and terrestrial trade routes. Again, this was most likely mutually beneficial as the cats would continue to keep rodents and other pests out of the trade goods, either in a caravan or ship. This was especially true in regards to shipping routes, as the researchers found Egyptian cats, for example, in Viking areas. In other words, cats were appearing in places they shouldn’t be, and that led the researchers to conclude that they were catching a ride.
The study suggested that cats became “domesticated” mainly because cats just hung around, and domesticated themselves. However, they also make it clear that domestic cats and wildcats remain nearly identical. The big difference is that house cats are more tolerant. Part of this also is because, as the study argues, there was no need to try to change cats, as they were seen nearly perfect as they were. Unlike dogs, they weren’t selected to perform different tasks, and thus we don’t see the diversification in cats that we do in dogs.
So in many ways, it seems more like cats have befriended humans, instead of being domesticated.
