On 2007-07-02 00:16, alexandru_mg3 wrote:
> If the cats really have 100,000 years of domestication...
No, no, they have not. Daniel has already explained what the original
article in Science actually says. Some of the lineages within the
species _Felis sylvestris_ diverged more than 100,000 years ago, but
that happened without human help, long before the domestication of one
of the wildcat subspecies (_F. s. lybica_). Thae authors make it clear
that cats were probably domesticated in the agricultural (Neolithic)
setting of the Fertile Crescent. See the abstract:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1139518
Piotr