>The Origin of the Cat

>The Near Eastern wildcat began tagging along with humans on their journeys 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, according to a new study.

The map shows the historic distribution of the five species of related wildcats, including the Near Eastern wildcat, F.s. lybica. Researchers pinpointed the ancestor of domestic cats by comparing DNA of several wildcat subspecies, including a type of European wildcat pictured above.

Top photograph courtesy Ewan Macdonald, bottom map courtesy Science.

Some say that there are two kinds of people in the world: dog people and cat people. While I don’t want to foster any kind of segregative animosity between fellow humans, it does seem to me that dogs, despite their fewer numbers as pets, tend to have the bigger mindshare. Dogs, not cats, are described as man’s best friend, and you hear of dog-related genetics a fair bit more than you do cat-related science. Not today though.

The reason for this disparity is that although there are hundreds of different varieties of domesticated cats, they don’t show the same spread of sizes and shapes we see in dogs. (Apparently, no one other than me thinks the idea of a Great Dane-sized cat is a good one.) What we do know is that cats and humans have lived together for almost 10,000 years. The earliest evidence of cats and humans together was found in Cyprus and dated at around 9,500 years ago. As to the origins of these early domestic cats, not a huge amount has been known. There are a number of subspecies of Felis silvestris in the wild: F. s. silvestris (Europe), F. s. lybica (Africa and the Near East), F. s. ornate (Middle East and Central Asia), and possibly F. s. bieti (China, although some argue this is a separate species). So which one of these groups did the world’s most numerous pets derive from? A new multinational research effort has found the answer, and it’s published in Science online today.

Carlos Driscoll and his colleagues across the world have collected DNA samples from almost 1,000 different individual cats and looked at different genetic markers to identify common ancestry patterns between domestic cats, purebreds, and wild cats. The data they gathered shows that domestic and purebred cats fall into the same clade as wildcats from the Near East, which matches up well with the archaeological data from Cyprus.

The researchers also worked out the approximate age of the species by looking at the genetic sequences with respect to the rate of mutation in order to calculate a molecular clock. It appears that there were five distinct maternal lineages within the domestic cat clade, as early as 100,000 years ago, predating any evidence of human domestication by an order of magnitude. These lineages all appear within the population of domestic cats.

So there you have it: your house cat, just like our modern civilization, most of our grain crops, and the majority of our domesticated livestock has its origins in the Fertile Crescent.

By Jonathan M. Gitlin.

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