Viking Cats

Blessi and his honorary Viking
cat Mittens

Did you know that there were Viking cats? As per a study reported in Scientific America, researchers
examined the mtDNA of 200 cats dating from 15,000 to 300 years ago.

Cats were associated with humans from the beginning of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, probably helping to control the rat and mice populations. One wave of cats came out of this area; the other, from Egypt. "Thousands of years later, cats descended from those in Egypt spread rapidly around Eurasia and Africa. A mitochondrial lineage common in Egyptian cat mummies from the end of the fourth century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. was also carried by cats in Bulgaria, Turkey and sub-Saharan Africa from around the same time. Sea-faring people probably kept cats to keep rodents in check, says Geigl, whose team also found cat remains with this maternal DNA lineage at a Viking site dating to between the eighth and eleventh century A.D. in northern Germany."

As Pontus Skoglund, a geneticist at the Harvard Medical School, states, “I didn’t even know there were Viking cats.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cats-conquered-the-world-and-a-few-viking-ships/