The Evolution of House Cats

The Evol­u­tion of House Cats: Sci­entific Amer­ican:

[genetic ana­lysis] revealed five genetic clusters, or lin­eages, of wild­cats. Four of these lin­eages cor­res­pon­ded neatly with four of the known sub­spe­cies of wild­cat and dwelled in spe­cific places: F. sil­vestris sil­vestris in Europe, F. s. bieti in China, F. s. ornata in Cent­ral Asia and F. s. cafra in south­ern Africa. The fifth lin­eage, how­ever, included not only the fifth known sub­spe­cies of wild­cat — F. s. lybica in the Middle East—but also the hun­dreds of domestic cats that were sampled, includ­ing purebred and mixed-breed felines from the U.S., the U.K. and Japan. In fact, genet­ic­ally, F. s. lybica wild­cats col­lec­ted in remote deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emir­ates and Saudi Ara­bia were vir­tu­ally indis­tin­guish­able from domestic cats. That the domestic cats grouped with F. s. lybica alone among wild­cats meant that domestic cats arose in a single loc­ale, the Middle East, and not in other places where wild­cats are common.

The art­icle goes on to pos­tu­late that wild­cats took advant­age of increased rodent pop­u­la­tions in prox­im­ity to humans, caused by the com­mence­ment of agri­cul­ture approx­im­ately 10,000 years ago in the Middle East’s Fer­tile Cres­cent — much earlier and in a dif­fer­ent loc­a­tion to the estab­lished wis­dom of where the rela­tion­ship between man and cat star­ted. Makes sense though.

(Via Sci­entific Amer­ican.)