LOS ANGELES — It may not surprise the average cat owner, but a team of researchers has discovered that the genome of domestic mousers differs only slightly from that of wild cats.

In other words, after 9,000-odd years of living alongside humans, the house cat remains only semi-domesticated.

After comparing the genome of an Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon to those of humans, tigers, cows, dogs and another white-pawed cat breed known as the Birman, researchers discovered that cats retain many of the hunting, sensory and digestive traits of their wild kin.

Where researchers did find a signal for human influence on cat evolution, however, was in fur color and pattern, as well as a set of genes that are thought to be associated with tameness.

“We believe we have created the first preliminary evidence that depicts domestic cats as not that far removed from wildcat populations,” said senior author Wes Warren, an associate professor of genomics at the Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis.

Unlike dogs, which some researchers say began their association with humans roughly 30,000 years ago, archaeological evidence suggests that cats first entered our living space when we began to grow crops.

Researchers hypothesize that early farmers welcomed the felines due to their ability to hunt grain-eating rodents. Farmers rewarded the efficient rodent-slayers with extra bits of food, researchers say.

Yet it’s only in the last 200 years that humans have placed intense selection pressure on cats, producing up to 40 different breeds, Warren said.

Warren and his colleagues said that this relatively short period of breeding was partly responsible for the modest influence domestication has so far had on the evolution of Felis silvestris catus. However, it wasn’t the only reason.

When examining the cat’s genetic makeup, the researchers found that the animals retained qualities of wild hypercarnivores — hunters that eat meat almost exclusively.