Every house cat descends from the African wildcat, first tamed around 10,000 years ago
The sandy, faintly striped African wildcat looks like a lean tabby, and that is no coincidence. Some of them were tamed in the Fertile Crescent about 10,000 years ago and became the ancestors of every domestic cat. The two still interbreed readily wherever their ranges meet.
The earliest hint of the partnership comes from Cyprus. At the Neolithic settlement of Shillourokambos, farmers roughly 9,500 years ago buried a wildcat beside a human skeleton, the oldest known evidence of a close bond between the two species. Genetic studies show domestic cats trace back to at least five maternal lineages, and a separate domestication in ancient Egypt produced a line that spread around the Mediterranean from the 8th century BCE and reached the Baltic coast by the 5th century CE.
Island cats have their own twist. The wildcats of Sardinia and Corsica were long treated as a native subspecies, but archaeology suggests they descend from domestic cats brought from the Near East, probably early in the first millennium, and have lived feral ever since. The wildcat on Sicily, by contrast, is the European species.
In the wild it ranges across nearly all of Africa, apart from the Congo rainforest, through the Middle East and Iran into Central Asia, reaching Xinjiang and parts of India. Adults weigh just 3.2 to 4.5 kilograms. Compared with the European wildcat it is smaller and shorter-furred, with a thin, tapering tail rather than a bushy one, and faint stripes that often break into spots. When threatened it fluffs up its fur to look bigger.
It hunts mainly at night, relying on hearing sharp enough to pinpoint prey, then creeping close under cover. Mice, rats, birds, reptiles and insects make up most of its diet, and it rarely needs to drink. Naturalists named many local forms over two centuries, but since 2017 only three subspecies have been recognised.
Source: African wildcat
