Your cat came from something. An actual wild species, still alive today. For centuries nobody could say which one, because most small wild cats look almost identical and guessing by appearance kept failing. So researchers tested the house cat's genetic code against every wild cat species on Earth and worked through them one by one.
Almost all of them failed, and most failed by millions of years. The lion and the tiger were never close. The leopard was not close. The European wildcat, which looks exactly like a grey tabby and even interbreeds with house cats, came back as a separate line. This video walks through the eliminations in order and then explains the one animal that came back as a match, why nobody suspected it, and why it never really became a house cat in the first place.
Sources:
— Driscoll C.A. et al. (2007). The Near Eastern origin of cat domestication. Science, 317(5837), 519–523.
— Ottoni C. et al. (2017). The palaeogenetics of cat dispersal in the ancient world. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 1, 0139.
— Johnson W.E. et al. (2006). The Late Miocene radiation of modern Felidae: a genetic assessment. Science, 311(5757), 73–77.
— Vigne J.-D. et al. (2004). Early taming of the cat in Cyprus. Science, 304(5668), 259.
— Montague M.J. et al. (2014). Comparative analysis of the domestic cat genome reveals genetic signatures underlying feline biology and domestication. PNAS, 111(48), 17230–17235.
— Ottoni C. & Van Neer W. (2020). The dispersal of the domestic cat: paleogenetic and zooarcheological evidence. Near Eastern Archaeology, 83(1), 38–45.
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