The exact history of human interaction with…

The exact history of human interaction with cats remains vague.

However, a shallow gravesite discovered in 1983 in Shillourokambos in southern Cyprus, dating to 7500 BCE, during the Neolithic period, contains the skeleton of a human, buried ceremonially with stone tools, a lump of iron oxide, and a handful of seashells.

In its own tiny grave forty centimeters (eighteen inches) from the human grave was an eight-month-old cat, its body oriented in the same westward direction as the human skeleton.

The cat specimen is large and closely resembles the African wildcat (Felis silvestris lybica), rather than present-day domestic cats.

This discovery, combined with genetic studies, suggest that cats, which are not native to Cyprus, were probably domesticated in the Near East, in the Fertile Crescent around the time of the development of agriculture and then they were brought to Cyprus and Egypt.

This is evidence that cats were being tamed just as humankind was establishing the first settlements in the part of the Middle East known as the Fertile Crescent.