New DNA research shows domestic cats and wildcat subspecies have one common wild ancestor originating from the Middle East.

Carlos A. Driscoll of the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland, and his colleagues spent over six years collecting and analyzing DNA from nearly 1,000 cats, both domestic and wildcats, traveling “in Scotland, down though Cape Town, and all the way to Mongolia and lots of places in between,” Dr. Driscoll said.

The team of researchers concluded that at least five subspecies of wildcat are the ancestors of today’s hundreds of millions of domestic and wild felines. Spread across the Old World, these subspecies are the European wildcat, the Near Eastern wildcat, the Southern African wildcat, the Central Asian wildcat and the Chinese desert cat.

DNA analysis showed that the Near Eastern wildcat is ancestor to today’s house cats, Dr. Driscoll and his colleagues reported in their paper published online by the journal Science.

The scientists found that the wildcat DNA most similar to that of modern cats came from 15 specimens collected in the remote deserts of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Until recently, it was largely believed that cats were domesticated in ancient Egypt. Recent research suggests that cats were domesticated eons earlier, during the initial stages of agriculture in the ancient Near East, some 9,500 years ago.

“All [domestic] cats are related to one another, and they all come from the same place, and that's the Near East,” Driscoll said. Today's domestic cats could well descend from the wildcat native to the area, Felis s. lybica.