Re: trichotomy revisited -- NEW INFO

Phillip Bigelow (
Fri, 23 Dec 1994 06:50:19 GMT (John Wilkins) writes:

>I haven't been following this very closely, so I may be about to commit a
>non sequitur:

>: (Kathleen Hunt) writes:
>: >**ALL** Old World monkeys, apes AND HUMANS, and in cats. The point of
>: >*that* paper was that cats acquired a virogene from primates.
>: >Interesting, but irrelevant to the discussion here.
>: >Kathleen Hunt
>: Actually, it may be very relevant. Of all of the cat species tested for
>: the virus (and there were many, see the above-quoted article), the common,
>: everyday housecat had the greatest expression of the gene (homology) of all
>: of the cat species. The housecat was much moreso than _all_ of the wild
>: African cat species. Why would a domesticated animal show the greatest
>: degree of exposure to the baboon -C virus? Could it be that the
>: domesticated housecat caught it from humans, at a time when humans were more
>: virulent? And if the common everyday housecat has the stongest expression
>: of this virus of all the cats, why wouldn't humans be exposed as well?
>: Phil Bigelow <pb>

>Ummm, as I understand it, jungle cats were domesticated less than 10,000
>years ago, at which time we have clear evidence of human dispersal over
>most of the globe, including the non-cat-domesticating areas such as South
>America. So, if the baboon -C gene is widely dispersed, then it is not
>likely that cats caught it at the time when humans were most virulent
>vectors of the gene, since one would assume that virulence would attenuate
>fairly rapidly, geologically speaking.

>Have I missed something here?

>John Wilkins, Head of Communication Services, Walter and Eliza Hall

According to the authors of the research, the European Wild cat and the
wild cats in North Africa were closely behind the domestic cat in "homology"
to the virus. Both of these wild species have geographic ranges that
parallel the spread of Homo out of the African Continent. The cat species
that showed little or no "homology" were the New World cats, which have
_only recently_ been in association with Homo (ca. 10,000 years or so).
There seems to be a rough correlation with the _early_ spread of Homo out of
Africa. To me, that holds the whole "geographical isolation" theory
extremely suspect.