【Watch Suicide Squad Online】

If your cat acts like it rules your apartment,Watch Suicide Squad Online and your soul, there's a good reason for that: Your feline descends from a long, enduring line of four-legged overlords.

A DNA analysis of more than 200 cats reveals how, over the last 9,000 years, the ancestors of today's domestic cat emerged from the Near East and Egypt to conquer the rest of the world.

SEE ALSO: Oh cool, cats are into fidget spinners now too

The new study, published on Monday in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, suggests that long before cats became our couch-hogging, computer-smothering companions, they were hard workers -- protecting barns, ships, and villages from disease-carrying rodents.

Via Giphy

Researchers in France and Belgium analyzed DNA extracted from the preserved teeth and bones of cats from Europe, north and east Africa, and southwest Asia. The remains spanned from Mesolithic Romania (around the middle of Europe's Stone Age) to 20th-century Angola.

The team found that cats spread in two waves, using humans to carry them via ancient land and maritime trade routes.

Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

The first group, dubbed IV-A, first appeared in southwest Asia and eventually spread to Europe as early as 4,400 B.C. The wildcat ancestor Felis silvestris lybica proved particularly adept at chasing off grain-eating rats in the Fertile Crescent, and early farming communities were likely first to domesticate the felines. Though, as we know, cats really domesticated themselves.

The second cat group, IV-C, dominated ancient Egypt, where cats were considered sacred. Then, in the first millennium B.C., cats spread to the Roman Empire and across the Mediterranean region. Researchers said that sailors likely brought cats along to quell the rodent populations on ships.

"Having arrived at these locations, introduced cats mingled with local tame or wild cats, leading to hybridization," the authors wrote in a press release.

Via Giphy

Yet it wasn't until the Middle Ages that the recessive gene mutation associated with tabby cat markings (the distinctive blotched stripes) appeared in the feline gene pool. Tabbies first showed up in southwest Asia, then spread throughout Europe and Africa.

This suggests that people likely initially started domesticating cats based only on their behavioral traits, rather than aesthetic factors like color or stripes, the authors said.

So there you have it, cats first proved themselves useful and then used their cuteness to make them truly indispensable. Sounds about right.

---

Featured Video For You

---

Watch dogs try cat toys for the first time

---

• Shopping
• Social Good
• Science
• Deals
• Games
• Digital Culture
• Life
• Tech

• Gods of War
• Is It a Lie to Live on the Fourteenth Floor?
• A Day at an Upper West Side Bank
• Staff Picks: Lorenzo Chiera, Michael Friedman, Yuknavitch
• Best soundbar deal: Save $300 on the Sonos Arc
• Linda Rosenkrantz on Her Book “Talk,” Fifty Years Later
• Antoine Volodine on Writing Post
• The Barbarism of Goebbels’s Diaries
• Best Garmin deal: Save over $100 on Garmin Forerunner 955
• Looking for Van Gogh in Abandoned Coal Mines

• July Blume fundamentalists need to chillax about this book cover
• New plan would pay your deposit back if you return your drinks containers
• Naomi Wadler had a powerful message to share with March For Our Lives
• March For Our Lives events got a big boost from an army of celebrities
• Spotify reports 2 million users were secretly blocking ads
• This Disney/Pixar movie bracket is starting so many internet fights
• Mark Zuckerberg to testify in Congress on Cambridge Analytica
• Review: 'Ready Player One' is a geeky, brainless roller
• Walmart removes 'Cosmopolitan' magazine from checkout lines
• America's youth finally destroyed slacktivism

• Big-League Bluster
• Teju Cole on Clubbing in Lagos
• Remembering James Salter: On His Essay “The Skiing Life”
• On the Origin—and the Modern
• Gods of War
• Why I Like Boiling Eggs
• Ezra Pound Chastises James Joyce’s Potty Humor
• Edgar Allan Poe’s “Eureka” and the Machinery of the Universe
• Whale Vomit Episode 5: Startup Monarchy
• “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” Saw Strange Forms of Censorship

• Robin Triumphant
• How Psychoanalysis Helped John Berryman’s Poetry
• Singing Show Tunes to James Salter
• Is It a Lie to Live on the Fourteenth Floor?
• Watch how an old Venus spacecraft tumbled before crashing to Earth
• We’re Bringing Back Our #ReadEverywhere Contest
• Iris Murdoch’s Favorite Painting, “The Flaying of Marsyas”
• Is Every Poem a Failure?
• No Time for a Negative Peace
• A 1922 Science Fiction Novel About Grafting Monkey Glands