The Researchers Have Defined Age Of The First Cat

The Researchers Have Defined Age Of The First Cat.
They may not hold the title of "man's best friend," but domesticated cats have been purring around the put up for a prolonged time. Just how long? New into or points back at least 5300 years, at which point felines needing chow and humans needing rodent killers may have entered into a mutually beneficial relationship. "We all sisterhood cats, but they're not a herd animal," study co-author Fiona Marshall said.

So "They're a individual species, and so they're really rare in archeological sites, which means we just don't be sure much about their history with people". New scientific methods enabled Marshall's team to show what led to cats' domestication. While dogs were attracted to kinsfolk living as hunter-gatherers 9000 to 20000 years ago, it looks be fond of cats were first domesticated as farmer's animals. "Cats had a poser obtaining food, and so were attracted to our millet grain.

And farmers had a problem with rodents, and found it useful to have cats pack away them," said Marshall, a professor of archaeology and acting chair of the anthropology concern at Washington University of St Louis. The findings are published in the Dec 16, 2013 version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors point out that although cats are one of the most trendy pet species in the world, information regarding the timing of their domestication has been sparse, based pre-eminently on Egypt artifacts that date back about 4000 years and show the animals were home dwellers then.

Additional anthropological demonstration of the connection had also been unearthed in Cyprus, the team notes, suggesting some form of close get hold of (although not necessarily domesticity) dating back roughly 9500 years. But an inability to join the dots between these two periods has frustrated researchers for years. The current revelation stems from an opinion of eight cat bones, attributed to at least two cats, unearthed near a paltry agricultural village known as Quanhucun in Shaanxi province, China.