Boy Bill, do you ask the hard questions. As far as I have been able to find out, only one study has been published on the genetics of African polecats, comparing them to Steppe and European varieties. It was done in Russia, which means it is not well known (I can e-mail the reference or send a copy of the article--it's in Russian with an English abstract). The conclusions from that study indicate the European polecat is the more likely ancestor. I might point out that this study dates to the 70s, when biologists were far more dogmatic in their conclusions, and genetic studies were not nearly as accurate as today's tests. Biologists have struggled for the last century to try and explain interspecies/intrafamilial relationships, and have yet to really succeed. One way is to visualize relationships as branches of a tree; one branch being European polecats, another as Steppe polecats, etc. But branches don't generally merge, and two species, closely related, can. So a more accurate example might be the interconnecting meanderings seen in slow and shallow creeks. Darwin thought of species in this way. But it is also flawed. There have probably been as many examples as writers, and none have been all that accurate. Still, we need something to explain the relationships between groups of animals if we ever hope to make any reasonable explaination of how nature works. When we look at a species, we often see it as the individual example set before us. An albino ferret, or a sable European polecat. But a species is actually all ferrets or all polecats considered as a whole. If you plotted all the characteristics of a species population 3-D, it would form a ball, with the most "typical" or "average" individuals nearest the center. The sphere that represents ferrets would have contained within it part of the sphere that represents polecats. Add the representitive spheres of all extant and extinct polecats, and parts of each sphere would also be contained within that of the ferret, some more so than others. There are points of overlapping where it is very difficult to assign species identifications to individual animals. You simply say it is more ferret-like than polecat-like. You can add the spheres of all other weasels, even all other mustelids, and find that ALL have some overlap within the ferret sphere, and in fact, the combined groups even form a sphere withich contains all mustelids. You can do this for carnivores, for mammals, for vertebrates, even for all life, and the 3-D plots will always form a basic spheroid shape, with the most typical nearest the center. Back to mustelids. Mentally erase the outer "wall" of the mustelid sphere, and look within, and you would see regions where there are apparent points of density that "stand out." These areas of density represent different species, and their distance and position from the center (or common ancestor) can represent the degree of relatedness between them. The assumption is often made that the closer the points of density, the more related the groups, which is unfortunate, because the degree of change is not correlated to time nor space. One point of density may migrate towards another point, so that two species NOT closely related will take on the appearance of close relatedness. If you looked only at the overlapping of polecat spheres (including the ferret), you would see that they are mostly contained within each other; something that looked like a bumpy ball. ALL polecats are very closely related. I know of no study that would support this, but I would expect all polecats to share at least 98% of their genetic code with each other, and possibly more like 99%. (For example, humans and chimps share 96-98%.) This way, it is easy to understand why the typical European polecat may be sable, but there are some that look marbled, or striped, or even ferretish. In fact, within EACH species of polecats, there are individuals that appear to be more like other species than themselves. I think the Steppe polecat is closer to the common ancestor than European polecats, mainly because they are so closely related to the black-footed ferret--they can successfully interbreed, etc, and are found in a larger geographic area. Also, the European polecat has an extra pair of chromosomes when compared to the Steppe polecat, and it is not hard to imagine a speciation event taking place where the result was the splitting of one chromosome into two, resulting in an extra pair. These mistakes happen all the time, usually resulting in the death of the offspring, but not always, otherwise WE wouldn't be here. This is simplier and more common than the reduction of chromosomes. IMHO, I think a common ancestor of all polecats bred several lines, one becoming the ancestor of the African polecats, the other resulting in the Steppe polecats (including the BFF). The Steppe line had a random muatation resulting in the European line. The ferret may have been from the Steppe line, and had the same sort of mutation as the European polecats, or more probably, it came from the European polecats or from a close lineage which is now extinct. Complicated, isn't it? Remember this one most important rule: Morphology does not prove relationships. Just ask an African and an Australian (non-European extract, that is). Bob and the 13 Spheriod Mustelids. [Posted in FML issue 1476]