All domestic cats have descended from at least five common ancestors in the Middle East, an international team of scientists led by Oxford University reported this week. The new research, published in this week’s Science, also suggests that the domestic cat’s ancestors diverged from the ancestors of other populations of today’s wildcats around 130,000 years ago, far earlier than previously suspected.

The scientists studied genetic material from 979 domestic cats and their wild relatives. The study was based on modern wildcats carrying the ancestral genes, who were sampled by the team during field studies, or in museums in Israel, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain.

“In our studies of mitochondrial DNA from these cats we found five distinct lineages dating back a hundred thousand years prior to any archaeological record of cat domestication. These appear to come from at least five female cats from the Near East whose descendants have been transported across the world by humans” said Professor David Macdonald, Director of the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, who led the work at Oxford University.

“These five matrilines were recruited at an unknown time during the last 130,000 years [possibly at different times and places in the Near East] as founder of the modern domestic cats.” Dr. Macdonald added.

The earliest archaeological evidence for cat domestication stretches back only to 9,500 years ago, when they are thought to have lived alongside humans at sites in Cyprus.

It seems that cats probably domesticated themselves, attracted by the rodent food that developed around human settlements when hunter-gatherers originally settled in agricultural villages in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East.

“The most exciting thing about these genetic insights from the past is that they offer hope for the wildcat’s future. In Scotland we’ve been striving to find a genetic marker to identify Scottish wildcats, and now we have one”

“In terms of practical conservation our next move is to use this marker to find out how many wildcats are left in Scotland, work we are planning with Scottish Natural Heritage” Dr. Macdonald concluded.

Dr. Macdonald, who has worked on cats around the world from barnyard cats to Lions and jaguars to cheetah, has devoted more than ten years to the conservation of the Scottish wildcat – Britain’s most endangered Carnivore, blighted by cross-breeding with Feral Moggies.