DNA traces 5 matriarchs of 600 million domestic cats

Some 10,000 years ago, an audacious wildcat crept into one of the crude villages of early human settlers, the first to domesticate wheat and barley. There she felt safe from her many predators in the region, like hyenas and larger cats, and the rodents that infested the settlers' homes and granaries were sufficient prey for her.

Seeing she was earning her keep, the settlers tolerated her, and their children greeted her kittens with delight.

At least five females, of the wildcat subspecies known as Felis silvestris lybica, accomplished this delicate transition from forest to village, scientists have concluded, based on new DNA research. And from these five matriarchs, all the world's 600 million house cats are descended.

Carlos Driscoll of the U.S. National Cancer Institute and colleagues spent more than six years collecting species of wildcat from Scotland to Israel. He then analyzed the DNA of the wildcats, of many ordinary house cats and of the fancy cats that breeders started to develop in the 19th century.

Five subspecies of wildcat spread across the Old World. They are known as the European wildcat, the Near Eastern wildcat, the Southern African wildcat, the Central Asian wildcat and the Chinese desert cat. Their patterns of DNA fall into five clusters. The DNA of all house cats and fancy cats falls within the Near Eastern wildcat cluster, making clear that this subspecies is their ancestor, Driscoll and his colleagues report in the latest issue of Science.

The wildcat DNA closest to that of modern house cats came from 15 individuals collected in the remote deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, the researchers say.

The house cats in the study fell into five lineages, based on analysis of their mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down solely through the female line. Since the oldest known archaeological site with a cat burial is about 9,500 years old, the geneticists suggest that the founders of the five lineages lived around this time and were the first cats to be domesticated.

By 10,000 years ago, wheat, rye and barley had been domesticated, so it is likely that the granaries of early Neolithic villages harbored mice and rats and that the settlers would have welcomed the cats' help in controlling them.

Unlike other domestic animals, which were tamed by people, cats probably domesticated themselves, perhaps accounting for the haughty independence of their descendants. "The cats were adapting themselves to a new environment, so the push for domestication came from the cat side, not the human side," Driscoll said.

Cats are "indicators of human cultural adolescence," he remarked, since they entered human experience as people were making the difficult transition from hunting and gathering to settled communities.

Until recently, the cat was commonly believed to have been domesticated in ancient Egypt, where it was a cult animal. But three years ago, a group of French archaeologists led by Jean-Denis Vigne discovered the remains of an 8-month-old cat buried with what was presumably its human owner at a Neolithic site in Cyprus. The Mediterranean island was settled by farmers from Turkey who brought their domesticated animals with them, presumably including cats, because there is no evidence of native wildcats in Cyprus.

The date of the burial, some 9,500 years ago, far precedes Egyptian civilization. Together with the new genetic evidence, it places the domestication of the cat in a different context, the beginnings of agriculture in the Old World and probably in the villages of the Fertile Crescent, the belt of land that stretches up through the countries of the eastern Mediterranean and down through what is now Iraq.

Dr. Stephen O'Brien, an expert on the genetics of the cat family and a co-author of the Science report, described the domestication of the cat as "the beginning of one of the major experiments in biological history," because the number of house cats in the world now exceeds half a billion, while most of the 36 other species of cat, and many wildcats, are now threatened with extinction.

So a valuable outcome of the new study is the discovery of genetic markers in the DNA that distinguish native wildcats from the house cats and feral domestic cats with which they often interbreed. In Britain and other countries, true wildcats may be highly protected by law but stray cats are not.

David Macdonald of Oxford University in England, a co-author of the report, has spent 10 years trying to preserve the Scottish wildcat, of which only 400 or so remain. "We can use some of the genetic markers to talk to conservation agencies like the Scottish Natural Heritage," he said.

Source


Wildcats are divided into five subspecies: the European wildcat, the Near Eastern wildcat, the Southern African wildcat, the Central Asian wildcat and the Chinese desert cat. This wildcat was photographed in Africa.
National Geographic on this

The Near Eastern wildcat still roams the deserts of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern countries. (See map.) Between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago the animal gave rise to the genetic lineage that eventually produced all domesticated cats. "It's plausible that the ancient [domestic cat] lineages were present in the wildcat populations back as far as 70,000 or 100,000 years ago," said study co-author Stephen O'Brien of the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland. The wildcats may have been captured around 10,000 or 12,000 years ago when humans were settling down to farming, he added. "One of nearly 40 wild cat species existing at that time, the little wildcat that lived in the Middle East had a genetic variance that allowed it to sort of try an experiment�let's walk in and see if we can get along with those people," O'Brien said.

Genetic Clues Driscoll's study began because genetics may be one of the only ways to determine which cats are truly wild. His group managed to successfully herd about a thousand wild and domestic cats and sample their DNA to produce the genetic study, which will appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science. In search of cats' wild ancestor, the team studied modern wildcat subspecies including the Near Eastern wildcat, the European wildcat, the Central Asian wildcat, the southern African wildcat, and the Chinese desert cat. The sampling of feline genes revealed that the Near Eastern wildcat and domestic cats fell into the same genetic clade, a group of species with the same ancestor. This meant the ancient ancestors of the wildcats were likely the first cats to be domesticated. The genetic diversity of living cats revealed that they must have existed for some 70,000 to 100,000 years to produce that degree of diversity.

edit:From IUCN/SSC Cat Specialist Group, below may give better understanding on the behaviors/habits the cat adopted since domestication.

Unlike feral domestic cats, which sometimes live in large groups or �colonies�, African wildcats are solitary. Liberg and Sandell (1988) point out that domestic cats tend to form colonies in the presence of clumped, rich food resources (such as garbage dumps), remaining solitary where prey is more evenly and thinly distributed. It is interesting that in captivity, female African wildcats have assisted mothers in provisioning of young with food (Smithers 1983), a behavior observed in feral domestic cat colonies. However, preliminary results from a radiotelemetry study in Saudi Arabia indicate that wildcats persisted in solitary habits while feral domestic cats formed groups around a garbage dump. This suggests that the domestication process may be the most important factor underlying the sociality of feral cats (Macdonald et al. 1991), perhaps leading to a broadening of the diet to include scraps and carrion.

link




Edited by Leonidas - 01-Jul-2007 at 04:20

Cats are "indicators of human cultural adolescence," he remarked, since they entered human experience as people were making the difficult transition from hunting and gathering to settled communities.

I'd be willing to venture that cats would have been appealing even to hunter-gatherers. The more advanced hunter-gatherer societies often stored their food just like agrarians. Seeds and nuts don't grow in winter but keep well, and roots are difficult to retrieve in colder climates during the winter. For instance, natives in California (Yurok, Pomo, Cahuilla, Miwok, etc) - who did not farm - built large granaries for the storage of seeds, roots, nuts, and dried fish - and they didn't even have much of a winter.

Great! I will tell this to the female cat I have..