Egypt

Egyptians not the first to domesticate cats

BBC News By Paul Rincon
Alright, so its a bit of a stretch to include this as Egyptology , but it does indicate that domesticated cats are now known in Cyprus before they first appear in Egypt.

The oldest known evidence of people keeping cats as pets may have been found 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.

See the above page for more details and photographs. For those of you who have not seen it, there is a link on the above BBC web page quoted above, takes you to a January 2007 article about the 2004 discovery of a mummified lion burial in a tomb in Saqqara Egypt.

Another cat-related article appears on the HealthDay website looks at the genetic structure of cats and suggests that modern domesticates have a single ancestor in the Near East:

Based largely on the archaeological record, some experts had speculated that the domestication of the cat occurred in separate places at separate times, giving rise to distinct lineages around the world. But the new gene study tells a different tale.
"All [domestic] cats are related to one another, and they all come from the same place, and that's the Near East" Driscoll said. Today's domestic cats probably all descend from the wild cat native to the area, Felis s. lybica.
Looking much farther back into the record, Driscoll and his colleagues also discovered that the various lineages of wild cat began branching off from a common ancestor, Felis silvestris, more than 100,000 years ago -- much earlier than was originally assumed.

Thanks to David Petersen for pointing it out to me. For more on at genome research at the NCI Laboratory of Genomic Diversity.

- Evolution Of The House Cat
Scientific American (by Carlos A. Driscoll, Juliet Clutton-Brock, Andrew C. Kitchener and Stephen J. O'Brien) It is by turns aloof and affectionate, serene and savage, endearing and exasperating. Despite its mercurial nature, however, the house cat...

- The Cat In Ancient Egypt
Felines in Egypt blog Thanks to Kat Newkirk for forwarding the link to this summary of the role of cats in ancient Egypt. It is written by blog owner Jessica J. Bogg, is accompanied by photographs and contains a list of references at the end. The cat...

- Early Cat Taming In Egypt
Archaeozoology The wild ancestor of our domestic cat is Felis silvestris, and more precisely its Levantino-African subspecies, F. s. lybica. The exact place and date of its domestication is unknown, but domestic status seems to have been reached by the...

- Ancient Egyptians Loved Their Dead Animals
http://www.discover.com/issues/jul-05/rd/ancient-egyptians-loved-dead-animals Thanks to David Meadows's "Explorator" for the above article on the Discover Magazine website: "As part of an exhibit on mummified animals, Sabin has been analyzing the...

- Who Tamed Who
This story about the domestication of cats leaves me to wonder about tolerance rather than "taming". The human home always had mice and I am sure that wild cats were probably tolerated long before they became pets. When the cats around but there are no...

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