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Cats came for the food, then stayed

New research indicates that our feline friends pretty much domesticated themselves when they learned food was near people.

By WASHINGTON POST
Published June 29, 2007

WASHINGTON - Your hunch is correct. Your cat decided to live with you, not the other way around. And it may not be a final decision.

But don't take this feline diffidence personally. It runs in the family. And it goes back a long way - about 12, 000 years, actually.

Those are among the inescapable conclusions of a genetic study of the origins of the domestic cat, being published today in the journal Science.

The findings, drawn from the analysis of nearly a thousand cats around the world, suggest that the ancestors of today's tabbies, Persians and Siamese wandered into Near Eastern settlements at the dawn of agriculture. They were looking for food, not friendship.

They found what they were seeking in the form of rodents feeding on stored grain. They stayed for 12 millennia, although not without wandering off now and again to consort with their wild cousins.

"It is a story about one of the more important biological experiments ever undertaken, " said Stephen O'Brien, a geneticist at the National Cancer Institute's laboratory in Frederick, Md., and one of the supervisors of the project.

"We think what happened is that cats sort of domesticated themselves, " said Carlos Driscoll, the Oxford graduate student who did the work.

There are today 37 species in the family Felidae, ranging from lions through ocelots down to little Mittens. All domestic cats are descended from the species Felis sylvestris ("cat of the woods"), which goes by the common name "wildcat."

The species is indigenous to Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. The New World, Japan and Oceania, lack wildcats. Their closest counterpart in North America is the lynx.

There are five subspecies of wildcats and they look very much like many pet cats, particularly non-pedigree ones.

Driscoll and his collaborators took blood samples and biopsies from all wildcat subspecies, and from fancy-breed cats, ordinary pet cats and feral cats. They analyzed two different kinds of genetic fingerprints.

Both showed that domesticated cats all around the world are most closely related to the wildcat subspecies lybica that lives in the Near East.

[Last modified June 29, 2007, 00:51:52]