I came across a cool article about cats and it inspired me to do this cat painting. According to the article, the mother of all cats lived in Mesopotamia - 130,000 years ago. From Persians to Siamese, Bengals to the Burmese, the cats of the world come in all shapes and sizes. But the ancestry of every one can be traced to the same incredibly specific source. All domestic felines are descended from a group of around five in the Middle East around 130,000 years ago, a study suggests. The findings overturn the traditional view that the first domestic cats were tamed by the Ancient Egyptians just 4,000 years ago. Instead, they were bred thousands of years earlier by farmers in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilisation. Researchers have traced the domestic feline family tree back to a small family of wild cats living on the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates in modern-day Iraq. The study used DNA samples from 979 wild and domestic cats to piece together the feline family tree. They looked for markers in mitochondrial DNA - a type of genetic material passed down from mothers to kittens which can reveal when wild and domestic cat lineages were most closely related. Aside from accidental cross-breeding, domestic cats are not closely related to the wildcats of Europe, Central Asia and Southern Africa, the team found. But their DNA is closely related to the Near Eastern wildcat. And this is the cat you see in my painting. :) Hope you enjoyed this bit of DNA history. Thanks for the wonderful comments and favs on my last picture. I appreciate it!