It’s common knowledge that cats domesticated themselves around 10,000 years ago, when they followed mice and rats into human grain storage facilities in the Fertile Crescent as humans moved from hunting and gathering to agricultural societies. That also happened in Egypt 3,500 years ago. So experts thought cats were taken around to the corners of the Greek and Roman Empires on ships between the third and seventh centuries. But more recent research upends that notion.
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It appears that house cats were already a thing in what is now Poland and Serbia during Neolithic period, around 8,000 years ago. Archaeological digs have uncovered bones of household cats that weren’t much different in size from the cats of the Fertile Crescent. That would indicate that it wasn’t ship’s cats that traveled to Europe and beyond, but they naturally spread when agriculture did, many thousands of years earlier. Where the food is, that’s where the mice go. And where there’s mice, cats will find them. You can read more about this research at Strange Maps. -via Kottke
(Image credit: M. Krajcarz et al, Antiquity, 2022)
Source: neatorama