Posted on 04/09/2004 5:34:44 AM PDT by vannrox
The oldest known evidence of people keeping cats as pets may have been discovered by archaeologists.
The discovery of a cat buried with what could be its owner in a Neolithic grave on Cyprus suggests domestication of cats had begun 9,500 years ago.
It was thought the Egyptians were first to domesticate cats, with the earliest evidence dating to 2,000-1,900 BC.
French researchers writing in Science magazine show that the process actually began much earlier than that.
The evidence comes from the Neolithic, or late stone age, village of Shillourokambos on Cyprus, which was inhabited from the 9th to the 8th millennia BC.
Cat culture
"The cat we found in the grave may have been pre-domesticated - something in between savage and domestic. Alternatively, it's possible it was really domestic," Professor Jean Guilaine of the CNRS Centre d'Anthropologie in Toulouse, France told BBC News Online.
The cat (centre bottom) was killed to be buried together with its "master"
"We have this situation of the person and the cat. This same situation of men and dogs are known much earlier from the Natufian culture of Israel which dates to 12-11,000 BC."
The complete cat skeleton was found about 40 cm from a human burial. The similar states of preservation and positions of the burials in the ground suggest the person and the cat were buried together.
The person, who is about 30 years of age, but of unknown sex, was buried with offerings such as polished stone, axes, flint tools and ochre pigment.
Based on this the researchers argue that the person was of high status and may have had a special relationship with cats. Cats might have had religious as well as material significance to the stone age Cypriots, the French archaeologists add.
'Religious animal'
"It's difficult to say the cat was a religious animal but it probably played a role in the symbolic and imaginative world of these people," Prof Guilaine explained.
During the Neolithic, when agriculture was beginning to spread from the Near East, grain storage would have attracted large mice populations. So cats may have been encouraged to settle in villages to control the mice.
Shillourokambos was a thriving village in the late stone age
"If this hypothesis is true, cats could have been attracted into the villages as early as there were mice. These mice in the Near East were present as early as 12,000 years ago," co-author Dr Jean-Denis Vigne of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
It seems the eight-month-old cat in the Cypriot burial was killed in order to be buried with the person. The skeleton shows no signs of butchering, suggesting that it was treated as an individual in death.
But burnt cat bones from a similar period at the site, attest to the fact that humans did eat the animals on certain occasions.
The cat specimen is large and best resembles the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), rather than present-day domestic cats.
There are no native feline species on Cyprus, so the authors presume any cats must have been introduced by humans.
My cats study the door handles intently, but they just can't reach high enough to do anything about it. But they seem to know that they'd be free to roam if only...
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My pick for the best cat book ever. Typically, Heinlein's cat is tough . . . (The guy and his cat live in a house with lots of doors. In the Winter, the cat makes the guy do all doors, searching for the door into Summer . . .) |
I like that. Might have to try to find that door myself.
I'm pretty sure it's a previously unpublished photo of my Ernie. ;o)
Contrary to films
and books and pop myth, clones might
not look like their source!
Here's the DNA
donor, the confirmed clone, and
the explanation:
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Robert Heinein. A guy gets screwed over by his wife and business partner, and because of suspended animation is able to have his revenge. He takes his cat with him into the sleep chamber.
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Gods |
Blast from the Past -- this topic is from 2004. |
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Slow week around the SunkenCiv hill fort and food emporium? ;-)
Exactly.
I love that book, also - one of Heinlein’s best, and that is saying a lot...
I'm goin' to teh aftrlyf, n' Im takin' you wit me.
Honor Harrington and Nimitz :)
Kitty ping?
I spent last week hurling large stones at the attacking barbarian hordes, so I figured I needed a week off. ;’)
This topic turned up in a search for Natufian on FR.
As if that wasn’t obvious. /joke alert
Oh my, this is an old one. Thread with nine lives eh?
Bastet approves
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