Domesticated cat remains in Egypt date to 3700BC

IT Wire

Belgium researcher Veerle Linseele, of the Center for Archaeological Sciences at Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and fellow-colleagues found a cat skeleton in a cemetery in Hierakonpolis. The ancient gravesite in southern Egypt contained the remains of the cat species thought to be Felis silvestris, also called the Wild Cat, the ancestor of the domestic cat. It is a member of the family of cats called Felidae, a hunter of small mammals, birds, and other such creatures.

Work performed by Linseele at the Hierakonpolis dig site is found at InteractiveDig, online page of Archaeology magazine:
http://www.archaeology.org/interactive/hierakonpolis/animals.html.

Researchers had already known that cats had first been domesticated by Egyptians sometime around the third millennium B.C. For instance, Egyptians kept cats for their perceived religious importance. However, a more specific time of domestication was not known, only that domestication occurred sometime during this one-thousand-year range of time.

The cat bones, of a young male, contained two leg fractures—a broken left humerus bone and a right femur bone—which had healed. The researchers concluded that such an injury would have doomed the cat in the wild. Consequently, the cat was assumed to have been in captivity prior to its injury.

An article covering this subject will appear in the Journal of Archaeological Science in Volume 34, Issue 12 (December 2007) : Evidence for early cat taming in Egypt, Pages 2081-2090, Veerle Linseele, Wim Van Neer and Stan Hendrickx. The abstract is free of charge but the full article can only be accessed free of charge if you are a member of a participating institution.