World's Oldest Pet Cat?

World's Oldest Pet Cat?
Reported by John Pickrell and written by Sarah Ives
National Geographic Kids News
May 07, 2004
People have had pet cats for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians kept cats as companions, worshiped them as gods, and used them for pest control. Egyptians even made some of their cats into mummies when they died!
Now scientists think that they have found the world's oldest known pet cat. This animal lived 4,000 years before the ancient Egyptians.
Scientists discovered the remains of a human and a cat in a 9,500-year-old grave on Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean Sea.
The burial "of this animal with a human makes a strong case that cats had a special place in the daily lives, and in the afterlives of, [the people on the island]," said Melinder Zeder of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Usually it's hard to say whether cat bones buried near humans belong to pets or just strays. Wild cats often lived near people because they were attracted to rats and mice that fed on human food.
Plus, pet cats are physically very similar to wild cats, so it's hard to tell whether bones come from a pet cat or a wild one.
But this cat was different. It was buried just 16 inches (40 centimeters) from a human. The human and the cat were also buried with seashells, polished stones, and other items.
"With this discovery, we can now decide that cats were linked with humans [at the time of this burial]," said Jean-Denis Vigne of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.
So are cats really man's best friend? Not so fast.
Dogs appear to have been pets much earlier than cats. Scientists have found evidence of pet dogs from 12,000 years ago!
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