I saw a tv program that showed these housecats who were more or less escaped and were actually barn cats, and there were a lot of them and this study found that should a kitten wander off and get lost, its maternal aunt (if she happened to be aroound) would take care of it like a mother, but if any male cat was around it would kill the poor little kitten. It said that cats are considered solitary but actually they are social and this above example is an example and there are other proofs that domestic cats are social and they have an alpha cat and all that and a beta cat, etc. etc.
Now putting this together with the fac that lions are also social whereas for instance tigers aren’t, do this mean that housecats and lions are related?more closely than the other cat family felines?
2) If you bred a lion with a cat which would have to be by artificial insemination of a male cat into a female lion (so her womb or uterus could be big enough to accommodate the baby in case it was going to be large, what would the result be?
I doubt that cats and lions can breed. This doubt is so strong I am not going to call anyone and ask.
On the MPSISMS side - People who are in a position to know tell me that, except for being 800 pounds, Tigers are pretty much like house cats. If you give them balls and toys, they will play.
House cats (genus Felis) are not particularly closely related to Lions (genus Panthera, along with Tigers, Leopards, and Jaguars).
Social behavior is something that is quite variable between species, and in fact often within species. Just because there are a few aspects of behavior shared by two species doesn’t mean they must be related. Despite their differing social behavior, Lions and Tigers are much more closely related to each other than either is to House Cats. House Cats and Lions are sufficiently distantly related that it’s pretty unlikely that a viable hybrid could be produced (though it’s possible).
Based on the standard binomial classification, we have housecats in genus Felis, and most big cats in the genus Pantera (I’ve also heard lions referred to as genus Leo, but I’m not sure if that’s accepted). By definition, members of different species can’t successfully interbreed (“successfully” meaning that the offspring are fertile), and as a general rule of thumb, critters in different genera can’t interbreed at all. So I’m going to guess that housekitties and lions can’t interbreed.
The largest member of the Felis genus is the mountain lion (AKA cougar, AKA puma). So I suppose there’s a possibility of interbreeding there, but I strongly suspect that the offspring wouldn’t survive past the zygote stage. If the gene mix ends up coding for, say, cougar-sized bones and a housecat-sized heart, there’s no way that organism is going to survive.
Disclaimer: I’m no taxonomist nor any other sort of biologist, and most of my information on the subject is about a decade old, from high school classes. It may be that new information in the meanwhile has led to changes in the classification schemes.
The other thing to remember is that domestic cats have been naturally and artificially selected for sociality, compared to their African Wildcat ancestors, who are definately solitary.
Imagine wildcats congregating around Egyptian granaries and eating the mice there. Those that tolerate the presence of other cats are selected for. There probably hasn’t been much artificial selection of cats, since they typically aren’t confined. But natural selection in the context of human commensalism has a similar effect.
Not close enough to breed, but I would imagine all cats are more closely related to each other than to anything outside the group.
Incidentally, didn’t all cats used to be in genus Felis at one point?
The genus Felis dates to Linnaeus in 1758. Panthera, for the big cats, was split off in 1816. Modern taxonomists usually recoginize at least these two genera, plus Acinonyx for the Cheetah, within the Felidae, but some recognize many more.
Keep in mind, humans never really domesticated cats. It is cats who domesticated humans. 
KGS
I am firmly convinced that if cats only had opposable thumbs we’d all be working in catnip factories today…not to say they do too shabby a job of running things around here without, after all they have full use of ours.
“When you get a dog, he gets a family. When you get a cat, he gets a staff.” Unknown
Sorry about the hijack, all.