Your cat is no pussy.
All domestic cats on the planet descended from wildcats which still prowl the deserts of Israel, Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Middle East, an international team of researchers has found.
House cats from Kazakhstan to Colombia are of the same wild origin, says Carlos Driscoll, a researcher at the University of Oxford in England and lead author of a paper to be published in today's edition of the journal Science. It outlines a genetic analysis showing that whatever the breed - from long-haired Persians to svelte Siamese - all domestic cats descended from the same Middle Eastern wildcats.
Until now, researchers weren't sure if house cats evolved separately, in a number of different parts of the world, from different ancestral wildcats.
Mr. Driscoll and his colleagues compared the genetic material of 979 domestic cats and a number of their feral feline relatives, including the Chinese desert cat, the European wildcat, the sub-Saharan African wildcat and the Near Eastern wildcat, which lives in the Middle East.
The team found that domestic cats closely matched the Near Eastern wildcats.
No one is sure how many of these ancestral animals are left, because even cat researchers can't tell whether a cat is wild just by looking at it. The Near Eastern wildcat looks the same as a ginger cat you might see prowling your neighbourhood or curled up on the couch.
Colour offers a clue that a cat is domestic. Domestic cats have a wider range of coat colours and patterns, while wild cats are orange, Mr. Driscoll said.
All the cats in the study - both domestic and wild - belong to the same species, Felis silvestris. But they form distinct subspecies.
The only subspecies found in North America, however, is the domestic cat - either pets or those that live a wilder lifestyle.
Cougars, for example, are a different species altogether.
The earliest archeological evidence for the domestication of cats dates to 9,500 years ago in Cyprus.
Cats likely domesticated themselves, David MacDonald, director of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit at Oxford said. The process probably started once humans settled and started farming in an area known as the Fertile Crescent, which includes parts of Iraq, Israel, Lebanon and Turkey. Their grain harvests would have attracted rodents and then cats.
The wildcats changed, and lost their fear of humans, and these changes were reflected in their DNA. As they became domesticated, they passed on genes to their offspring that made living with humans easier. But they didn't lose all their wildness, Mr. Driscoll said.
Domesticated cats were eventually transported all over the world by humans and became the most popular household pet on the planet, Mr. Driscoll said.
But sometimes they take a walk on the wild side, reverting to feral ways, and in some parts of the world, mating with wild subspecies, including the Scottish wildcat.
There are as many feral cats in the world as there are pets, Mr. Driscoll said.
His team found genetic markers for the wild subspecies, the Scottish wildcat among them, which should help conservation efforts. The Scottish wildcat is considered Britain's most endangered carnivore. It has been blighted, Dr. MacDonald said, by cross-breeding with domestic cats known as feral moggies.
"The most exciting thing about these genetic insights from the past is that they offer hope for the wildcat's future," Dr. MacDonald said. Now that scientists have a way to identify pure Scottish wildcats, researchers will be able to figure out how many are left in Scotland.
The findings also have implications for medical research. Scientists at the National Cancer Institute in the United States, who were part of this study, are close to completing the sequencing of the cat genome.