CYPRUS Ancient burial indicates early human-cat ties

The cat had a special place in the burial plot.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- That contented calico purring away on the sofa may be the product of a human-feline friendship extending 9,500 years or more into the past. Although ancient Egypt provides the first written record of cats, a burial discovered on Cyprus indicates humans and felines may have become associated much earlier.
It's a relationship that has ranged from their being adored as gods in the Nile valley to their slinking into medieval witchhood and rising again to be revered in poet T.S. Eliot's verses and in the stage show "Cats." Today, more than 30 percent of American homes host a cat.
A theory
Jean-Denis Vigne of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris believes the relationship first blossomed with the development of agricultural societies 10,000 or so years ago.
"It seems that cats probably came more and more frequently into villages where grain stocks attracted numerous mice," said Vigne. "I think that human beings rapidly understood that they could use cats for reducing the number of mice."
It was Vigne's research team that uncovered the carefully buried cat on Cyprus, placed just inches from a human burial that also contained polished stones, shells, tools and jewelry. The graves are estimated to be 9,500 years old.
The cat belonged to the Felis silvestris species, a wild cat, which was significantly larger than modern domestic cats. The cat's bones were placed carefully, parallel to the human, and showed no signs of butchering, another indication that the animal may have been a pet, Vigne said in a paper in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Evidence of taming
The finding seems to be evidence of cats' being tamed earlier than previously thought, said Melinda Zeder of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. If the cat was intentionally buried with the human, which it seems to have been, Zeder said, "what they've got is pretty good evidence of a kind of relationship with humans."
It's hard to know whether it was a pet or a working mouser because "the bones aren't talking," said Zeder, president of the International Council for Archaeozoology.
What may be surprising is that there hasn't been evidence of an earlier relationship with cats, she added, noting that indications of human-dog relations go back 12,000 years.
Blaire Van Valkenburgh, a biology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, agreed the finding is "the first suggestion that there was a significant emotional attachment" between a human and a cat. Cats are not native to Cyprus, so their presence on the eastern Mediterranean island indicates they were brought there at some point.
Bred in Egypt
The best known ancient evidence of cats comes from Egypt, where the animals were bred 4,000 or more years ago. Cats were often included in Egyptian art and worshipped as the cat goddess Bastet. Stones engraved with images of wild cats and other animals have been discovered from Western Asia and dated back to the Early Neolithic -- 4000 to 3000 B.C.
This may be evidence that cats had spiritual significance for humans, according to Vigne, though the real meaning of the representations is irreparably lost.