"....another early morning of polishing the helmet and sword"
Posted on 08/08/2018 10:58:35 PM PDT by BenLurkin
n the first large-scale study of ancient feline DNA, the results reveal how our inscrutable friends were domesticated in the Near East and Egypt some 15,000 years ago, before spreading across the globe and into our hearts.
The study was presented at the International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology in Oxford, UK back in 2016, and sequenced DNA from 209 cats that lived between 15,000 and 3,700 years ago - so from just before the advent of agriculture right up to the 18th century. Found in more than 30 archaeological sites in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, these ancient feline specimens are helping researchers to piece together the beginnings of an animal that we share our beds with, but know surprisingly little about.
"We don't know the history of ancient cats. We do not know their origin, we don't know how their dispersal occurred," one of the team, Eva-Maria Geigl, an evolutionary geneticist from the Institut Jacques Monod in France, told Ewen Callaway at Nature.
Analysing the DNA of cats found in ancient Egyptian tombs, burial sites in Cyprus, and an old Viking settlement in Germany, the team found that cats likely experienced not one, but two, waves of expansion during their early history.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com ...
"....another early morning of polishing the helmet and sword"
Here is an interesting article on the Maine Coon Cat. It certainly supports the idea that Vikings brought some of the original breeding stock. Perhaps it went wild and then mated with cats brought by early New England/Canadian settlers. The fact that it has a gentle good natured disposition makes sense. Can you image several months at sea with a cranky, restless cat? Might get thrown overboard by those “good natured” Vikings.
http://www.unm.edu/~njmoore/MainCoonHistory/History.htm
Could have bred with indigenous lynx, that happens with other domestiCATed cats.
Schoch should stick to geology - a subject he gets wrong even then.
The Sphinx was likely a Egyptian dog - the symbol of Anubis, the guardian of the dead at the necropolis of Giza. Facing East as Ra was reborn each morning; served as the Horus on the Horizon line; part of the huge geometrical Giza design.
During the First Integrum most of Giza was vandalized and what could be smashed was destroyed, Later In the Middle Kingdom, the stump of the head was re carved in the likeness of the then current pharaoh, Amenemher II (1876-1842 BC), which we see today.
Again Schoch is a nutter trying to make a case for something he knows professionally nothing about, nor does he know anything about what the Sphinx was originally used for - which would more than account for his age of the Sphinx theory.
This post has MADE MY DAY.
The study was presented at the International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology in Oxford, UK back in 2016, and sequenced DNA from 209 cats that lived between 15,000 and 3,700 years ago - so from just before the advent of agriculture right up to the 18th century. Found in more than 30 archaeological sites in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, these ancient feline specimens are helping researchers to piece together the beginnings of an animal that we share our beds with, but know surprisingly little about.
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Shouldn’t cats be taking credit for human civilization? They organized us for their benefit.
That happened to my cat but the second vet operated on her and inserted a rod from the top of the leg to the bottom and wired it together. About two months later, I took her back to have the rod removed and she was good to go...........
Later...
These are SO COOL!!!
Don’t click on my link. There is, oddly, no sound with the video. I’ve asked for it to be removed.
Some would argue that the cats domesticated the human servants.
Queue the Viking Kitties.
5.56mm
I think it would give them a catarrh, or head cold.
Ships have rats, they need cats.
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