The Afro-Asiatic wildcat is the world’s most widespread small wildcat. This cat lives across most of Africa, Southwest and Central Asia, India, China, and Mongolia.
At some point thousands of years ago, the Afro-Asiatic wildcat was domesticated. That event makes this cat species the ancestor of the common house cat. If you have a cat, it has a wildcat deep in its DNA.
You could mistake an Afro-Asiatic wildcat for a family pet. They’re the size of a large domestic cat, but with longer legs. Their coloration varies from reddish, sandy and tawny brown, to grayish. They have faint tabby stripes or spots. Their tails are slim with a dark tip. A distinguishing feature is the pinkish-orange tint of their ears.
Afro-Asiatic wildcats hunt small rodents, reptiles, and invertebrates. The stomach of an Afro-Asiatic wildcat from Oman contained beetles, grasshoppers, lizards, mammal fur, and a date pit.
Nobody is sure how Afro-Asiatic wildcats got domesticated. An early theory was that farmers in the Fertile Crescent (modern Iraq) domesticated cats and brought them to Cyprus in the early Neolithic period (roughly 10,000 years ago). The cats may have been domesticated to control rats and mice that damaged stored grain. This theory was mainly based on a complete cat skeleton, dated to roughly 7500 BCE, found buried with a man on Cyprus.
Another theory was that Egypt was another center of domestication, based on six cat skeletons, dating to around 3700 BCE, found in an ancient Egyptian cemetery.
Genetic studies show that wildcats were taken to Cyprus, but it looks like it was an attempt of Neolithic people to domesticate European wildcats. That event was probably not where the domestic cat was actually domesticated into the common house cat.
How kitties of today were domesticated from their Afro-Asiatic ancestors remains a mystery to be solved.
David Brown adapted this story for Mongabay Kids. It is based on an article by Petro Kotzé, published on Mongabay News.
