Cats were domesticated by humans as early as the beginning of the first millennium BC, which probably influenced the decline in the population of European wild cats. The material about this was published on the preprints site bioRxiv.
Scientists have come to the conclusion that the domestication of cats in Egypt was associated with the cult of the goddess Bastet. She was originally depicted with the head of a lioness, but around the ninth to seventh centuries BCE she began to be depicted with the head of a wild cat.
This encouraged the mass breeding and domestication of cats sacrificed to the goddess. They subsequently spread beyond Egypt, and the first wave of their migration to Europe began before the expansion of the Roman Empire.
It was previously thought that European forest cats became extinct in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries due to habitat loss and hunting. However, research has shown that their population began to decline much earlier – in the fourth to eighth centuries AD.
The reason was the displacement of forest cats by domesticated animals that competed with them for resources. As for the ancient remains of cats found in Cyprus and dated 9,500 BC, scientists attribute them to forest cats, which also lived near people, but were not domesticated.