Koltans Natural Selection project
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- their wildcat ancestorsSaber tooth tiger. They remain perfectly capable of surviving in the wild, and indeed many revert to a feral or wild existence. Based on the mitochondrial DNA we have estimated that house cats and saber-toothed cats shared a common ancestor about 20 million years ago.
- wild cats and domesticated cats have remarkably similar skeletons, complicating the matter. Some clues first came from the island of Cyprus in 1983, when archaeologists found a cat's jawbone dating back 8,000 years.
- nearly 3,000 before the date of the Cyprus tomb's cat—it actually is a perfectly logical one, since that is precisely when the first agricultural societies began to flourish in the Middle East's Fertile Crescent.
- Cats have developed a wide range of coat colors – under natural conditions, these are adaptations to allow the cat to be camouflaged and assist its hunting lifestyle
- Genetic analysis has demonstrated that the DNA of modern-day domestic cats throughout the world is almost identical to that of Felis sylvestris lybica, clearly showing that it is this species that gave rise to our domestic cats.
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