07/09/2026
Archaeologists digging through Viking-age settlements in northern Germany kept finding cats. Not local cats.
The bones dated to somewhere between 700 and 1000 AD. But the DNA told a stranger story than anyone expected.
In 2017, a team led by Claudio Ottoni published a large genetic study of ancient cat remains from sites across Europe. When they analyzed the Viking-era specimens from northern Germany, the mitochondrial DNA pointed clearly to the Near East and Egypt, lineages that had no business being that far north at that point in history.
The most likely explanation: the cats had sailed there.
Norse seafarers kept cats aboard their vessels for the same reason every maritime culture did. A ship carrying grain is also carrying rats. A ship carrying rats loses its provisions. A ship with a good cat keeps both the grain and the crew fed.
What made these particular cats remarkable was the distance they had traveled. Egyptian and Near Eastern cats, aboard Viking longships, moving north through trade routes and raiding routes across several centuries.
And when they reached shore, they were not treated as working tools.
A number of these animals were buried with care. The skeletal record suggests they were valued, not just useful. In several sites, cat bones appear alongside human graves, which researchers read as deliberate placement, not coincidence.
Over generations, something else happened: the cats grew larger. The remains show a gradual increase in body size across the Viking age, which researchers connect to better feeding and, possibly, selective pressure aboard ship.
Some researchers have noted that these ancient imported cats may sit near the base of what eventually became the Norwegian Forest Cat: the large, thick-coated breed that Scandinavians would later call the skogkatt, the forest cat.
If that lineage holds, one of the most beloved cat breeds in the world traces part of its ancestry to Egyptian mousers who crossed the North Sea on longships more than a thousand years ago.
The Norse sagas mention wolves. They mention ravens. They mention bears.
Nobody wrote down the cats.
Would you have brought one aboard?
