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Since at least the time of the ancient Egyptians, cats have been cherished as companions, worshipped as idols, and kept as agents of pest control and good luck. But now French archaeologists have found evidence that our close relationship with cats may have begun much earlier.
The carefully interred remains of a human and a cat were found buried with seashells, polished stones, and other decorative artifacts in a 9,500-year-old grave site on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. This new find, from the Neolithic village of Shillourokambos, predates early Egyptian art depicting cats by 4,000 years or more.
Jean-Denis Vigne, an archaeologist with the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, and colleagues describe the find in tomorrow's edition of the research journal Science. The researchers write that the joint burial indicates a strong association between the human and cat and that the feline is possibly the world's oldest known pet cat.
"The process and timing of cat domestication has been terrifically difficult to document," said Melinder Zeder, a curator of Old World archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,...
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