In two related studies, researchers from the University of Oxford and elsewhere sequenced the genomes of wildcats and domestic cats, including 48 modern individuals and 258 ancient samples excavated from 85 archaeological sites over the last 8,500 years. They then assessed the patterns of hybridization after domestic cats were introduced to Europe over 2,000 years ago and came into contact with native European wildcats. Their results demonstrate that, since their introduction, domestic cats and European wildcats generally avoided mating. About 50 years ago in Scotland, however, that all changed. Perhaps as a result of dwindling wildcat populations and a lack of opportunity to mate with other wildcats, rates of interbreeding between wild and domestic cats rose rapidly.
Domestic cats (Felis catus) were derived from the Near Eastern wildcat (Felis lybica), after which they dispersed with people into Europe.
As they did so, it is possible that they interbred with the indigenous population of European wildcats (Felis silvestris).
Gene flow between incoming domestic animals and closely related indigenous wild species has been previously demonstrated in other species, including pigs, sheep, goats, bees, chickens, and cattle.
In the case of cats, a lack of nuclear, genome-wide data, particularly from Near Eastern wildcats, has made it difficult to either detect or quantify this possibility.
To address these issues, the authors generated 75 ancient mitochondrial genomes, 14 ancient nuclear genomes, and 31 modern nuclear genomes from European and Near Eastern wildcats.
Their results demonstrate that despite cohabitating for at least 2,000 years on the European mainland and in Britain, most modern domestic cats possessed less than 10% of their ancestry from European wildcats, and ancient European wildcats possessed little to no ancestry from domestic cats.
“Wildcats and domestic cats have only hybridized very recently,” said Dr. Jo Howard-McCombe, a researcher at…
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