Across the dwindling forests of Europe, various populations of wildcat, Felis sylvestris, create a kind of negative image of human civilisation.

Half as large again as the domestic cat, camouflaged like the broad-leafed forest they patrol, they are nocturnal and solitary, coming together only to breed and fight. They follow rabbits, birds and small rodents. They tolerate snow, dislike conifers, can live for weeks in swampy land by picking off rats sheltering in trees.

They are truly wild, unlike feral cats which rarely break free of human settlement, with its garbage and rats. Indeed, they are determined to avoid human contact, and their kittens can never be domesticated.

They have individual territories which cover at least a couple of square kilometres, and may travel ten kilometres per night on feeding patrol. They have been doing this for around 250,00 years, retreating and advancing with the glaciers, and splitting into five distinct sub-species according to recent genetic research.

The range of Felis silvestris extends from China to Scotland and sub-Saharan Africa. Of th subspecies, the European wildcat is the closest to the original; the animals in some Iberian variants are as large as the ancestral cat.

In this long, flowing story, the moggie is a new arrival. The earliest example of a domestic cat was found in a Neolithic grave in Cyprus, among the dead of people who probably brought the animal from Turkey. It has been dated to 9,500 years BP, which connects neatly to the origins of agriculture.

For the last six years, Professor David Macdonald and Carlos A. Driscoll from Oxford University’s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and their colleagues have been studying genetic samples of cats from across the whole range. It turns out that the closest match to the modern domestic cat in the great kingdom of Felix comes from desert wildcats living from Israel through to Bahrain.

With the usual mitochondrial work, they established that the common moggie is descended from at least five cats who contributed genetic material over 130,000 years, members of a sub-species of wildcat already separated in the Near East. Coming from roughly the same region where humans worked out how to store grain around ten thousand years ago, it seems logical that the cat came to us for the wheat-fattened rodents.

There is something touching about the way cats settled in to eat the rats and mice infesting granaries, stayed with us for ten thousand years as farming spread across the world, and hitched a ride on our journey into cities and the global economy. There may now be half a billion domestic cats.

Meanwhile, the European wildcat, the animal which started this long migratory drama, has been forced to retreat, although it gains ground with the wretched condition of some post Soviet economies. Most at risk is the Scottish variant, believed to number around 400 in the wild.

Like the Australian dingo, it mates readily with domestic animals, so the population hybridises and evaporates into something more amorphous and less distinctly adapted. Dependent on trees, it is forced back as housing estates replace Scottish woodland. Seen as the gamekeepers’ enemy, atavistically feared in the night, it was legally hunted until a few years ago. Asocial, territorial and competitive, it is vulnerable to diseases like cat flu and feline leukaemia which spreads from bites and scratches.

They are difficult to breed in captivity, where they are deceptively cute and loveable -

Only thirty percent of animals from a captive breeding program survive in the wild, even though they are said never to develop an attraction to humans. The natural environment is a tough place, even for a predator honed by sixty million years of evolution, but roads are still the big killer.

The Scottish variant, itself the remains of the British population isolated from Europe as the North Sea poured in around – yes – nine thousand years ago – is being defended by a campaign involving Professor Macdonald.

“The most exciting thing about these genetic insights from the past is that they offer hope for the wildcat’s future.

“In Scotland we’ve been striving to find a genetic marker to identify Scottish wildcats, and now we have one.”

Prof MacDonald added: “Whatever the future holds, the domestication of the cat to complement human civilisation stands out as one of the most successful ‘biological experiments’ ever undertaken by humans.”

So why is the Scottish wildcat important in the scheme of things? I can’t find a direct answer to that question. Intuitively, I feel that highly adapted subspecies still operating in an environment should be defended; in some ways the animal is a marker of an ecology, and that complex meta-creature should be protected because it encodes all the diversity within – which is a mindboggling set of connections.

The long journey of the European wildcat is instructive here. It operated in a particular ecological band, which moved with the Ice Ages; pushed into Africa and Asia, the species stayed as conditions improved. The dates are pretty vague, but the cross into domesticity occurred around the time of the mini-ice age of the Younger Dryas. Some recent theories suggest that domestic agriculture was formed from this crisis, as the previously abundant grains and herds collapsed into a few waterholes which were gardened by surviving tribespeople. It may be the wildcat did the same, as hungry cats scavenged the proto-farmyards, and the most curious stayed to be touched and fed.

It shows us how species and ecologies can survive by moving across the planet; I guess you would find that every major ecosystem which has endured for long periods is inherently transportable. Against human change, these systems don’t stand a chance. Even now we are watching the Australian temperate rainforests die, ending a long journey from Gondwanaland. Taking with them the Myrtle Beech and perhaps the Huon Pine.

I guess my attachment to natural entities like dingos, native orchids and heathland vegetation is ultimately aesthetic – I want to live in a world in which we are part rather than masters, humbling in its intricacy and reassuring in its indifference. The Scots are discovering that their distinctive native cat is part of their identity, a kind of totemic creature which enables them to assert a definition which blows with the wind through hill and glen.

A definition with which we in Australia are still struggling amidst the richness of our physical world and the cultural inheritance of its original inhabitants.

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I’ve told this story confidently, but the internet sources are pretty spongy. So many accounts refer directly to the Wikipedia entries, which had better be accurate. Major stopping points included The New York Times, Felinefuture and Wikipedia.

There is a wildlife documentary, with a trailer.

This, by the way, is completely insane –

There are a few caveats to this scene, of course. The animals are in a “wildlife preserve”; he will only do this if they learn to accept him in their first year. He is described as a “lion whisperer” (der), an animal behaviourist and a physiotherapist. I suspect he relies on a keen understanding of animal anatomy to create a bond, sense danger and adopt ritualised positions.

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