Are Maine Coons and Siberians related?

Are Maine Coon cats and Siberian cats related? I will start by saying perhaps the obvious which is that every animal is related if you go back far enough and if you believe in evolution as opposed to creation. Every animal on the planet started with bacteria in the sea about 3.8 billion years ago (estimated). Anyway, I'm being a little bit flippant but I don't think that Siberians and Maine Coons are related.

Siberian

Siberian cat bred in Russia at the Golden Dream Cattery. Please click on the photo for more. Photo: Golden Dream Cattery.

As the names of these cat breeds suggest they come from different parts of the planet. The Siberian cat's origins are in Siberia, Russia and the history is long at about 1000 years. The story is that they lived in monasteries acting as guards and the monks treated them as pets. The breed was exported to the United States on June 28, 1990. So, the origin of this cat breed is that they were moggies i.e. random-bread cats in Siberia for about a thousand years before the concept of the cat fancy came to fruition and breeders, through selective breeding, created the Siberian cat breed in the 1900s.

Maine Coon

Maine Coon bred in Russia with an interesting coat. Photo: Irina Goriunova (Russian breeder of this cat).

The history of the Maine Coon cat is very well known and a bit vague! The starting point is long haired cats from England and Europe which were brought across the Atlantic to the state of Maine in the USA with the early settlers in the 1600s and later. 

So, the question here is whether these longhaired random-bred cats in England and Europe were linked in any way i.e. related to the Siberian cats and there is no record of it. It is unlikely but, that said, all domestic cats are related because they all originate from the early domestication about 10,000 years ago of the North African wildcat.

This happened it is believed in the Fertile Crescent which is more or less where Syria is today. And these very early domestic cats were transported with commercial travellers around the globe and therefore there is a relationship between all domestic cat but you have to go back thousands of years to achieve that relationship. It's a bit artificial when you look at it that way.

I think that if people are asking whether one breed is related to another they are thinking in hundreds of years as a maximum not thousands and therefore I conclude that Siberian cats are not related to Maine Coon cats.