From the New Yorker

Recent DNA studies suggest that cats entered the human sphere during the Neolithic period, at the dawn of agriculture, when Felis silvestris lybica, the Arabian and African subspecies of wildcat, developed a high tolerance for living among people. (In 2004, researchers in Cyprus found a cat skeleton carefully buried with a human in a ninety-five-hundred-year-old grave.) As grain storage became common and mice became a problem, cats wandered into settlements in the Fertile Crescent. And when the technology of agriculture was transferred to other cultures cats went with it: the genetic fingerprint of all domestic cats can be traced back to the delicate wildcats that decided to improve the human experience with their presence about twelve thousand years ago.