Hey everyone. I have been looking for this answer online but can't find it. I thought I read somewhere once that cats were native to Northwestern Africa before being domesticated but I have no idea how true that is. Does anyone know for sure?
The study results published in the National Geographic article state that our domestic cats are genetically indistinguishable from the African Wildcat. A friend from South Africa works for the protection of these animals; as they are able to mate with domestic cats, their remaining population is threatened for a lot of reasons: hybridization being one of them. They look like tabby cats - only there are no white patches naturally occurring in the wildcat population. http://www.saveacat.org/acrmexico.htmlNational Geographic said every domestic cat the tested was genetically the Little African Wildcat.
That is an interesting article. Thank you for posting it.Here you go. Just a theory though
http://theophanes.hubpages.com/hub/Theories-on-the-Domestication-of-Cats
That is really interesting! Thanks!A couple of years ago a group of scientists got together an did DNA analysis on cats from around the world in an attempt to answer this very question. They results were that our domestic cats are descended from wildcats found in Turkey and Syria, more specifically from Felis sylvestris lybica. There is also evidence that cats domesticated themselves closer to 100,000 years ago.
The study was done on mitochondrial DNA (only passed through the mother) so they were able to pinpoint the region by comparing it samples of DNA from current populations of wildcats.
You can read the actual study report here if you like. http://www.mobot.org/plantscience/resbot/Repr/Add/DomesticCat_Driscoll2007.pdf
For those who aren't into reading studies like this, they did compare Sand Cats to domestic cats, but they are not the progenitors of our house cats as previously hypothesized.