Scientists Compared House Cat DNA To Every Wild Cat — Only One Matched Seatgeek [GAPd1LmYZfL]

There are around 600 million alexander volkov domestic cats on Earth. Every single one from a Persian in a Moscow apartment to a street cat in Cairo to a tabby in rural Japan traces back to a single wild ancestor from one specific region of the world. When scientists collected DNA from domestic cats across every continent and compared it to the full range of wild cat species alive today, only one wild cat matched. And wnba scores it was not the wild cat anyone expected.

This video covers what happened when researchers ran the comparison: how they eliminated species after species, what the genome of a house cat actually looks like compared to its wild ancestor, why cats domesticated themselves rather than being domesticated by humans, what role ancient Egypt played in spreading cats around the world, and bulgaria why the house cat is the least genetically changed domesticated animal on Earth.

Sources:

Driscoll C.A. et al. (2007). The Near Eastern Origin of Cat Domestication. Science, 317(5837), 519523.

Ottoni C. et al. (2017). The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 1(7), 0139.

Montague M.J. et al. (2014). Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication. PNAS, 111(48), 1723017235.

Lipinski M.J. et al. (2008). The ascent of cat breeds: genetic evaluations of breeds and worldwide random-bred populations. Genomics, 91(1), 1221.