Tigers (and all other carnivores) are descended from civet-like animals
called miacids that lived during the age of the dinosaurs about 60 million
years ago. These small mammals, with long bodies and short flexible limbs,
evolved over millions of years into several hundred different species,
including cats, bears, dogs and weasels. Approximately 37 cat species exist
today, including Panthera tigris, the tiger.
Tigers evolved in eastern Asia. Andrew Kitchener states in the book The
Natural History of Wild Cats, that
"Fossil tigers are known from the Late Pliocene/Early Pleistocene of
southeastern Asia. A small primitive tiger was living in North China during
the Early Pleistocene. Between 1.3 and 2.1 million years ago, tigers were
living in Java...from about two million years ago, tigers spread from their
evolutionary centre in eastern Asia in two directions. Tigers moving through
the Central Asian woodlands to the west and southwest gave rise to the Caspian
tigers. Secondly, tigers from China moved to the east of the central Asian
mountains to southeastern Asia and the Indonesian islands, and thence
westwards to India (Hemmer, 1987)."
