Cats as our Human Ancestors (?)
Did you know?
Except for primates, cats are our closest relatives.
People who do not accept the idea that man evolved from the apes simply ignore the great mass of compelling scientific evidence which really leaves little doubt on this issue.
What I find to be the interesting question is - from which animals did the apes evolve from?
Some time ago I advanced the idea that cats were on the direct evolutionary line to humans, an idea which occurred to me seeing a neighbor cat spending a lot of its time in the neighborhood trees. Could it be that the monkeys derived from cats and that the smaller monkeys led to the primates, which led to man?
An article in the Smithsonian Magazine confirms my initial hypothesis that the cats are genetically in fact very close to humans.
In a September 2002 article there entitled Happening Cats, we find the following written:
"But perhaps the most unexpected genome sweepstakes so far is the probe of the house cat. The impetus for the work is an underappreciated genetic similarity between people and cats. Not that it’s in our nature to chase mice or purr when scratched behind the ears, but scientists have found that when it comes to the arrangement of genes on our chromosomes, we’re closer to cats than to any other animal group studied so far except primates.
That turns out to be useful. Parallels between human and cat genes may lead to new understandings of and treatments for diseases and may also shed light on some of the steps that evolution has taken to shape the two species in the 90 million or so years since cats, people and other mammals had a common ancestor...."
2:34:18 PM 
|
