African wildcat

• 1. Introduction

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  The African wildcat, Felis lybica, lay in a grave beside a human being about 9,500 years ago. The grave was in Shillourokambos, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic B settlement on Cyprus. Neolithic farmers are thought to have dug it. Within it, a wildcat rested next to a human skeleton. It is the earliest known evidence of a close bond between a cat and a person. Its closeness to the body suggests the animal may have been tamed or even domesticated. The species itself is small, sandy grey, and marked with pale stripes. It lives today across Africa and parts of Asia. So how did naturalists ever sort out which wildcat was which? Where did this animal come from, and how did it end up beside people? And what is life like for a cat that most people will never see?

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• 2. A Crowd of Names

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  In 1780, Georg Forster gave the species the name Felis lybica. His description rested on one specimen from Gafsa on the Barbary Coast. It was about the size of a domestic cat, yet its fur was reddish. It had short black tufts on its ears and a ringed tail.

  Over the next two centuries, naturalists and museum curators kept coining new names for wildcats from Africa and the Near East. Johann Friedrich Gmelin proposed Felis ocreata in 1791. He built it on a description of a wildcat that James Bruce had met in northern Ethiopia. In 1822, Anselme Gaëtan Desmarest named Felis cafra from two skins from South Africa's Eastern Cape.

  Harold Schwann proposed three names in 1904. One came from two skins from northeastern Rhodesia, held by the Natural History Museum, London. Another came from a skull and a fulvous skin of a male from Belgian Congo. The third rested on a skull and a yellowish-grey skin of a male from Uganda.

  Ángel Cabrera named a form in 1906 from a single skin from the Mogador area in Morocco. Edmund Heller followed in 1913 with a skull and a light-coloured skin of a female from Voi in southeastern Kenya. In 1920, Robert Ernest Cheesman described a dove grey skin with salmon buff shading from Kuwait. He compared it with a similar specimen from the Tigris River.

  Oldfield Thomas and Martin Hinton named Felis haussa in 1921. Their specimen was a sandy-coloured male from the Aïr Mountains south of Zinder. In 1926, Thomas added two more names. One came from a pale skin from south of Benguela in Angola. The other came from a pale skin from Namaqualand in Namibia.

  Reginald Innes Pocock published a long run of names in 1944. For Felis lybica pyrrhus, he used a series of ten greyish brown skins from Benguela. For tristrami, he used a pale buffy white skin of an adult female from the Moab area. Four more names came from Darfur, northern Nigeria and northern Somalia. They included a very pale skin from north of Al-Fashir and a dark skin from Bauchi State. A pale brown skin from the Golis Mountains in northern Somalia was the last of these.

  David Harrison added Felis silvestris gordoni in 1968. It rested on a skull and a very pale grey brown striped skin of a female from west of Sohar in Oman.

  Since 2017, only three subspecies have been recognised as valid. The nominate form, F. l. lybica, lives in North Africa and Sinai through to Sudan. The southern African wildcat, F. l. cafra, lives in Southern Africa. The Asiatic wildcat, F. l. ornata, lives in Asia. Genetic studies later tested how these three groups are related.

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• 3. Deep Family Tree

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  DNA from tissue samples of every cat species points to Asia as the place where the cat family's radiation began, during the Miocene. Within the genus Felis, the jungle cat, F. chaus, was the first species to branch off. Both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA models agree on that point. The black-footed cat, F. nigripes, came next, then the sand cat, F. margarita. The African wildcat diverged after them.

  Europe tells a different part of the story. Felis lunensis lived there during the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and the Asian and European wildcats descend from it. Wildcat fossils turn up only in Europe until the late Pleistocene. Then an early form of the steppe-type wildcat appears to have split from the European population. It expanded quickly into the Middle East, and secondary expansions into Southern Asia followed soon after.

  A mitochondrial DNA study of 979 domestic cats and wildcats from Europe, Asia and Africa gives dates for the splits. It suggests the African wildcat separated from the European wildcat about 173,000 years ago. About 131,000 years ago, the North African and Near Eastern wildcat split from the Asiatic wildcat and the Southern African wildcat. These branches are the ones that now carry the three subspecies names.

  One of those branches, the Near Eastern wildcat, would later become the ancestor of a far more familiar animal.

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• 4. Road to the Housecat

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  Some African wildcats were tamed in the Fertile Crescent about 10,000 years ago. Those animals became the ancestors of the domestic cat, Felis catus. Genetic work shows that domestic cats trace back to at least five "Mitochondrial Eves". That means several separate maternal lines fed into the cats we know.

  Ancient Egypt had its own domestication. The Egyptian lineage began spreading around the Mediterranean Basin from the 8th century BCE. By the 5th century CE, it had reached the Baltic Sea coast.

  Sardinia offers a smaller test case. Researchers analysed 87 cat samples from southern Europe. The Sardinian specimens formed a genetic cluster with African wildcats from northwestern Africa. The oldest cat in that cluster is about 2200 years old and was found at an archaeological site near Genoni.

  The islands of Sardinia and Corsica once seemed to hold a true wildcat subspecies, named Felis lybica sarda. Zooarchaeological research now tells another story. Those cats descend from domestic cats brought over, probably at the start of the first millennium. The founders came from the Near East, and the populations are feral today.

  Sicily is different again. The wildcat there is a European wildcat.

  The line between wild and domestic has never been fully sealed, and that creates a problem for anyone trying to protect the wild animal.

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• 5. Anatomy of a Sandy Cat

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  A male African wildcat from northern Africa measures between 47 and 59.7 cm from head to body. Its tail adds another 26.7 to 36.8 cm. Females are somewhat smaller, at 40.6-55.8 cm with tails of 24.1-33.7 cm. Males from Yemen measure 46-57 cm, and females there measure 50-51 cm. Both sexes weigh between 3.2 and 4.5 kg.

  The coat is light sandy grey, sometimes with a pale yellow or reddish hue. It turns almost whitish on the belly and throat. Pale vertical stripes on the flanks often dissolve into spots. A dark stripe runs down the back, and the flanks are lighter.

  The face carries bold markings in dark ochre to black. Two stripes run along each cheek from the outer corner of the eye to the jaw. A smaller one runs from the inner corner of the eye to the nose pad. Four to six more cross the throat.

  The ears are reddish to grey, with small tufts and long light yellow hairs around them. Two dark rings circle the forelegs, and the hind legs are striped. The tail has two or three rings near the end and a black tip. The soles of the feet are dark brown to black.

  A European wildcat looks different in several ways. It has bolder stripes on the nape and shoulders, a sharper stripe across the spine, and a bushier tail. The African wildcat is considerably smaller, with shorter fur and a slender, cylindrical, tapering tail.

  That slender build is made for a range that spans several continents.

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• 6. Range and Habitat

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  The Hoggar Mountains in the Sahara are one of the few desert places where African wildcats are common. Across most of the desert, they live at much lower densities. They do best where the terrain is rugged.

  North of the Sahara, the species ranges from Morocco to Egypt. South of it, the cats live in tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannas and shrublands. That belt runs from Mauritania to the Horn of Africa, including Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Sudan. They inhabit every country of East and Southern Africa. The one exception is the dense tropical rainforest of the Congo Basin, where they are absent.

  The range continues into the Middle East, including parts of the Arabian Peninsula and most of Iran. In Central Asia, it follows the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea and crosses Kazakhstan. It reaches as far east as Xinjiang in China. The cat is also present in parts of India, with Rajasthan at the edge of its range.

  What it does inside that enormous territory is largely a matter of darkness and patience.

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• 7. Night Hunter

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  Kirk's dik-dik, a small antelope, is on the menu in northern Namibia. The African wildcat hunts it there even though the prey is of similar body mass to the cat. That shows how varied its diet can be.

  The cat is mainly active at night. Its hearing is fine enough to pinpoint prey exactly. It creeps forward patiently and uses vegetation as cover. It rarely drinks water. The usual prey includes mice, rats, birds, reptiles and insects. By day it usually hides in bushes, though it may be active on dark, cloudy days.

  Diet changes with place. In West Africa, it takes rats, mice, gerbils, hares, lizards and small to medium-sized birds, including francolins. In Southern Africa, it also attacks antelope fawns and domestic stock such as lambs and kids. In Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, it hunts mainly murids, with birds, small reptiles and invertebrates taking second place.

  When confronted, the cat raises its hair to look bigger and scare off its opponent. A male's territory overlaps with those of up to three females.

  The female carries her young for 56 to 60 days. In Botswana, she gives birth mostly in the warm wet season, usually to one to three kittens. Litters of up to five have been seen. She chooses a sheltered den, such as dense grass, a burrow or a hollow tree.

  The kittens open their eyes after about 10-14 days. At one month they can move around. At about three months they begin learning hunting from their mother. They leave the family and become independent at around six months old.

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• 8. Wild, Hybrid, Protected

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  The African wildcat is listed in CITES Appendix II. Protecting it is complicated by how easily it mixes with the housecat. Hybrids between the two species are common wherever their ranges overlap.

  In Asian steppe-type wildcats, the effects of hybridization are less visible than in European forest wildcats. As a result, telling a "pure" Asian wildcat from a free-living domestic cat can be hard where they share a location. Some Asian populations may derive mainly from feral cats.

  The similarity between the two species has an odd practical side. A domestic cat can act as a surrogate mother for wildcat embryos, and can carry and bear one. A BBC documentary describes the experiments that led to this discovery. It also shows a mature wildcat born to a surrogate female.

  The species has also appeared on a postage stamp. In November 1997, the Libyan Posts issued a stamp dedicated to the African wildcat, in cooperation with the World Wide Fund for Nature. The issue was also released as a set of four stamps printed on a minisheet.

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