…an analysis of the largest ever collection of ancient cat bones in China—reported this month on the preprint server bioRxiv—suggests housecats may have arrived in the country around 600 C.E., hundreds of years after they set paw in Europe. They appear to have been brought by merchants from the West, traveling along the famed Silk Road.
“It’s a knockout study,” says Melinda Zeder, an archaeozoologist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the work. Cats recently became the most popular pet in urban China, and the new research helps clarify how they first got there, she says. “Tying them to the Silk Road is really boffo.”
Silk Road merchants may have introduced cats to China 1400 years ago
American Buddhist Net 