Are Cats Domesticated?

This post is a companion to the one about the long history of dog domestication (see Domestication of Dogs).  A recent piece in The New Yorker addresses the question that many people with cats (like me) are prone to ask (when their cats don't act like dogs): Are cats domesticated? From the article: 

In a study published last year, Wesley Warren and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis analyzed DNA from several wildcats and breeds of domestic cat. They confirmed that, genetically, cats have diverged much less from their wildcat ancestors than dogs have from wolves, and that the cat genome has a much more modest signatures of artificial selection. Because cats also retain sharper hunting skills than dogs, abandoned felines are more likely to survive without any human help. In some countries, feral cats routinely breed with their wildcat cousins. “There’s still a lot of genetic mixing,” Warren said. “You don’t have the true differentiation you see between wolf and dog. Using the dog as the best comparison, the modern cat is not what I would call fully domesticated.”

I thought so. [NOTE: Image above shows Colby (see Colby); he is a very accomplished hunter].

Domestication of Dogs

Interesting recent paper about the domestication of dogs. Using a semicustom 185,805-marker genotyping array, a large-scale survey of autosomal, mitochondrial, and Y chromosome diversity was conducted in 4,676 purebred dogs from 161 breeds and 549 village dogs from 38 countries [NOTE: I took this from their Methods section; don't ask me about autosomal diversity or genetic markers, please].

Dogs are the first domesticated species, originating at least 15,000 years ago from Eurasian grey wolves (shown above).  What the authors of this paper discovered  is that the first domestication event occurred in Central Asia, probably near present-day Nepal and Mongolia. Good to know the next time you pet your dog.