But they likely didn’t realize a sneaky hitchhiker, the Near Eastern wildcat, was coming along, too. When the migrants reached Poland about 6,000 years ago and started converting forests into ...

The Near Eastern wildcat still roams the deserts of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern countries. Between 70,000 and 100,000 years ago the animal gave rise to the genetic lineage that ...

Some wild cats tagged along; archaeologists found Near Eastern wildcat skeletons in Poland from around the same period. Archaeologist Magdalena Krajcarz of Nicolaus Copernicus University and her ...

All of the domestic cats – from the fancy breeds to feral tabbies – fell within the Near Eastern wildcat group. Furthermore, lap cats descended from five distinct mitochondrial DNA lineages.

The Old World wildcat ranges from Scotland to China and down into Africa, but a new DNA study indicates that just one of its lineages, that of the Near Eastern wildcat, gave rise to today’s ...

DNA analysis of global archaeological remains suggest that two wildcat populations, from the Near East and ancient Egypt, ...

a wildcat subspecies found in North Africa and the Near East. Cats were domesticated some 10,000 years ago by the first farmers in the Near East. The first agricultural settlements probably ...

Through DNA technology, the researchers say they traced the domestic feline's ancestry back to the Near Eastern wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica) that roamed what is today Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and ...