June 29, 2007	Friday	Jamadi-us-Sani 13, 1428

WASHINGTON: The first house cat was a fierce mouser that struck an enduring friendship with early farmers who settled in the fertile lands of the Middle East 10,000 years ago, researchers said.

Through DNA technology, the researchers said they were able to trace the domestic feline’s ancestry back to the Near Eastern wildcat that roamed the ‘Fertile Crescent’ of what is today Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

The wildcat emerged from the woods as the early farmers began settling down and developing grain stores that attracted rodents, but it was friendlier than other members of the felidae family, said senior author Stephen O’Brien.

“The felidae family is well known as a successful predator — very deadly, very ferocious, very threatening to all species including humankind,” O’Brien, of the US National Cancer Institute, said.

“But this little guy actually chose not to be that,” he said. “He actually chose to be a little bit friendly and also was a very good mouser.”

The Near Eastern wildcat brought ‘two very valuable commodities’ to these early farmers, O’Brien said. “One is, he helped dispatch the thousand or so rodents that were living on the grain stores and second he probably provided some amusement to the early families and their children by being friendly,” he said.

“So that was the beginning of one of the most successful biological experiments ever undertaken, where a nasty, ferocious, deadly predator changed its attitude and became friendly with humans,” O’Brien said.

The researchers were also able to trace back the “Adam and Eve” of cats to some 100,000 years ago, although there is no archaeological evidence to show that humans were already domesticating felines at the time, he said.

The researchers used DNA samples from 979 cats to study the evolutionary ties between the domestic feline and five wildcat subspecies from three continents, including the Near Eastern wildcat.

The researchers were able to rule out the European wildcat, the Central Asian wildcat, the southern African wildcat and the Chinese desert cat as the domestic feline’s ancestor.

The authors, in the study published today on the Science Express website, found that each subspecies and domestic cats fell into a group, or “clade,” that was genetically distinct.

One clade includes the domestic cat and his Middle East relative, suggesting this group stems from the ancestral founder population of the house cat, they said. Its descendants were then taken across the world by humans.

“All domestic cats seem to have a single common ancestor,” said Carlos Driscoll, the study’s lead author and a doctoral student at Oxford University.

Today’s Near Eastern wildcat, which lives in the remote deserts of Israel, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries, probably looks similar to its ancestor, Driscoll said.—AFP