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Cats have long accompanied sailors on ships, as was the case for the first domestic cats in what is now the U.S. The earliest known domestic cat in what is now the United States perished 466 years ago in a shipwreck off the coast of Florida, a new study finds.
The ship was part of a Spanish colonizing expedition led by the conquistador Tristán de Luna y Arellano, who was voyaging from Mexico under the Spanish crown. In September 1559, a hurricane in Pensacola Bay wrecked several of the 11 ships, which had been anchored near the new Spanish settlement of Santa María de Ochuse. Researchers found one of these wrecks, known as Emanuel Point II , in 2006 .
This shipwreck holds the remains of an adult and a juvenile domestic cat (Felis catus), according to the new study, which was published April 14 in the journal American Antiquity . "Our current understanding is that all domestic cats come from ancestors in the Middle East . So, they had to be introduced to the Americas by people," said study co-author Martin Welker , an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in zooarchaeology at the University of Arizona.
Archaeologists had previously found domestic cat remains in other early Spanish settlements, including the Indigenous Taíno town of En Bas Saline in what is now Haiti, where Chistopher Columbus landed in 1492. But..
. Margherita Bassi.
