your point is?
Posted on 06/29/2007 8:02:15 AM PDT by DogByte6RER
Scientists believe cats 'sort of domesticated themselves'
THE WASHINGTON POST
June 29, 2007
WASHINGTON – Your hunch is correct. Your cat decided to live with you, not the other way around. The sad truth is, 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.
The story is quite different from that of other domesticated animals – cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and dogs, cats' main rivals for human affection. It may even provide some insight on the behavior of the animal that, if not man's best friend, is certainly his most inscrutable.
“It is a story about one of the more important biological experiments ever undertaken,” said Stephen O'Brien, a molecular 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 University of Oxford graduate student who did the work, which required him, among other things, to befriend feral cats on the Mongolian steppes.
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 nonpedigree ones. The Scottish wildcat, for example, is indistinguishable from a barn cat with a mackerel tabby coat. These animals, however, are true wild species. They are not escaped pets that have become “feral,” or reverted to the wild.
Driscoll and his collaborators, who included Oxford zoologist David Macdonald, took blood samples and ear punch biopsies from all wildcat subspecies, and from fancy-breed cats, ordinary pet cats, and feral cats. They analyzed two different kinds of genetic fingerprints.
One was nuclear DNA, which carries nearly all of an animal's genes and reflects inheritance from both parents. The other was mitochondrial DNA, which exists outside the cell nucleus, carries only a few genes, and descends through the generations only from the mothers, never from fathers.
Both fingerprints showed that domesticated cats all around the world are most closely related to the wildcat subspecies (called lybica) that lives in the Near East.
One might think that people in each region would have domesticated their local wildcats. In that case, European pet cats today would genetically most closely resemble European wildcats and Chinese cats would be descended from East Asian wildcats. But that isn't the case.
Why not?
Genetics can't answer the question, but history and archaeology can provide a good guess.
Large-scale grain agriculture began in the Near East's “Fertile Crescent.” With the storage of surplus grain came mice, which fed on it and contaminated it.
Settled farming communities with dense rodent populations were a new habitat. Wildcats came out of the woods and grasslands to exploit it. They may have lived close to man – but not petting-close – for centuries.
Eventually, though, natural selection favored individual animals whose genetic makeup by chance made them tolerant of human contact. Such behavior provided them with them with things – a night indoors, the occasional bowl of milk – that allowed them to out-compete their scaredy-cat relatives in town.
I've long been sure that the one wish, shared by every cat on the planet, is for opposable thumbs.
If that wish ever comes true, watch out!
Mark
My wife is more of a cat person. We have three, and I apparently belong to the last one. He came to us two years ago, sick and hungry, on the eve of the worst snow storm of the year. I went to the wood pile for a load to fill the wood racks, and heard a "meow". I knew my wife wasn't really wanting another cat, and I also knew if he came in he probably wasn't going to leave. I briefly considered whether I was going to be more trouble if I brought him in or left him out.
I believe that there's a general prohibition on mammalian predators too.
Mark
Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods.
They have never forgotten this.
Is this your cat, or Jimmy Carter you're talking about here?
Mark
your point is?
I guess there’s hope for democrats. Once they domesticate themselves they will stop peeing all over us.
They allow us to house them and feed them.
Hey! Never leave a sexy gal like that...
In... 
the shadows!
And you... 
wanted to send me to hell...
NiMH is quite terrified of this cross-breed rabbit, he’s bigger than the cat.
Somebody let some domestic rabbits loose, and they mixed with the local flop eared critters, and now we have some odd looking rabbits.
The cat is quite spooked by this.
LOL...GOod one!
What do you mean by that? Do you think they are going to steal your wallet? 
And how much did this study cost us?
About $35.00
Thank you, but I forgot to mention, I don’t own anything that can’t go 2 weeks without water.
Heard Rush say it often.
Of course, he's curious about new stuff, too.
And I've used him to make this picture:
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