Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 12NOV2025 – Selective Breeding

Nature seems far more experimental at some level than we are used to. Consider for example Felis Catus (nee Felis Domesticus). They have only been hanging out with humans for ~10K years when they apparently self domesticated from Felis Libyca/Felis Sylvestris (it’s all about the mousies). There are SOME early traditional breeds of Asian cat e.g. Siamese cats (first mentioned 14th Century) and Japanese Bobtail (6th century prints) that have been around long times. Specific breeding other than perhaps for mousing ability, really only starts with cat shows the first in England being 1871. So 150 years of specific cat breeding. Currently TICA (one of several Cat fancy organizations) lists 73 breeds ( https://tica.org/ticas-breeds/browse-all-breeds/ ). The variance is not as great as say canines (that we’ve been hanging out with for 50K years and breeding selectively for over 15K years), but its starting to get some of the oddball shapes (e.g. Pixies or Munchkins) that resemble some of the dog breeds (Corgi/Dachshund) we are familiar with in their particulars. I suspect the evolutionary forces on our ancestors and their “kissing” (well this is a family blog so we’ll leave it at that 🙂 ) cousins were far greater than what we impose on show cats. I suspect that another factor that has significantly changed Anthropology (and the study of any set of animal clades) is the ability to map and recognize genes. This let us realize that H. Neanderthalis was the likely source of the M1CR gene that defines human redheads. Not sure if there is any trait that we directly trace to H. denisoviensis but maybe those genes are not quite so showy