The Crawling Geek

That purring furball curled up in your lap (or, alternately, noisily tearing around the place in the middle of the night for absolutely no discernible reason) may have been there longer than you think. Archaeologists had thought that the Egyptians were first to domesticate cats, with the earliest evidence dating to roughly 4,000 years ago.

But French researchers have news for them.

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.

No cat species are native to Cyprus, so the assumption is any cats there were introduced by humans. This particular complete cat skeleton was found a little over a foot (40 cm) from a human burial of what appeared to be a person of unknown sex but of high status. The positioning and similar states of preservation indicate that the person and the cat were buried together - and the lack of any sign of butchering of the cat suggests it was buried as an individual after being killed in order to be interred with the person.

While "the cat we found in the grave may have been pre-domesticated - something in between savage and domestic," said Professor Jean Guilaine of the CNRS Centre d'Anthropologie in Toulouse, France, "it's possible it was really domestic."

And in either event, domestication was at least well along.