Hey, folks. I don't know where to put this exactly, but it has to do with cat genetics, so I guess I'll put it here? Mods, feel free to move it if there's a better spot.
Cats are thought to have originally come from African wildcats, although small wildcats exist in most places in the world. It is quite likely that, for those of us living in Europe or their former colonies, many of our cats are also mixed with European wildcats, since domestic cats are still very similar to wildcats in both appearance and temperament if wild born, and are fairly amiable to free-mating with wildcats.
I am a little bit of a biology nerd who can spend forever Wiki-jumping through various evolutionary trees. I was on the domestic cat one, and read something interesting.
One of the traits absent from the African wildcat, but that does appear in the European wildcat, is the dark stripe going down their spine. This is something a lot of our tabbies have, and something my Pia has as well.
Suddenly I had an image in my head of Pia's great (x200) grandcat coming here on a boat as a rodent-hunting able seacat. A stockier, thicker-coated cat than the ones purely from African origins -- like Pia is. The African wild cats are a bit taller, and leaner-limbed. And of course, they lack that famous tabby stripe.
And this is somewhat visible when you look at random-bred cats from different places in the world. A British feral is especially stocky and will tend to have a very dense coat, somewhat like the Scottish wildcats of the region. An Asian random-bred cat is more likely to have a leaner build.
It's interesting to imagine what those cats might have looked like, and all of their diverse places our cats' genetic lines came from. If it were possible to build a cat family tree, I bet there'd be a lot of interesting intermixing and cool stories about how cats got to be everywhere in the world, picking up genetic diversity from local wildcat populations along the way.
Just an interesting thought I was entertaining.
Cats are thought to have originally come from African wildcats, although small wildcats exist in most places in the world. It is quite likely that, for those of us living in Europe or their former colonies, many of our cats are also mixed with European wildcats, since domestic cats are still very similar to wildcats in both appearance and temperament if wild born, and are fairly amiable to free-mating with wildcats.
I am a little bit of a biology nerd who can spend forever Wiki-jumping through various evolutionary trees. I was on the domestic cat one, and read something interesting.
One of the traits absent from the African wildcat, but that does appear in the European wildcat, is the dark stripe going down their spine. This is something a lot of our tabbies have, and something my Pia has as well.
Suddenly I had an image in my head of Pia's great (x200) grandcat coming here on a boat as a rodent-hunting able seacat. A stockier, thicker-coated cat than the ones purely from African origins -- like Pia is. The African wild cats are a bit taller, and leaner-limbed. And of course, they lack that famous tabby stripe.
And this is somewhat visible when you look at random-bred cats from different places in the world. A British feral is especially stocky and will tend to have a very dense coat, somewhat like the Scottish wildcats of the region. An Asian random-bred cat is more likely to have a leaner build.
It's interesting to imagine what those cats might have looked like, and all of their diverse places our cats' genetic lines came from. If it were possible to build a cat family tree, I bet there'd be a lot of interesting intermixing and cool stories about how cats got to be everywhere in the world, picking up genetic diversity from local wildcat populations along the way.
Just an interesting thought I was entertaining.
