Almost 20,000 years ago the dog became man’s best friend, however cats needed more time to establish a close relationship with the human being. According to the latest research published in the journal PNAS, it would have been 5,000 years ago when felines became a domestic animal partly motivated by the new way of life of humans settled near fixed areas of crops.
To reach this conclusion, an international team of scientists has analyzed the remains of the Chinese site of Quanhucun . In it, feline skeletal remains have been found and, after conducting radiocarbon tests and analyzing carbon and nitrogen footprints, they have found that the cats fed on the millet crop grown by farmers.
“Unlike dogs, which were domesticated by hunter-gatherers, cats were related to humans thanks to agriculture because there were rodents and other food available to them more than 5,300 years ago,” he points out to the scientific news agency SINC. Fiona Marshall, a researcher in the department of anthropology at the University of Washington (USA) and one of the authors of the study.
In addition, the discovery of an old burrow near a food storage well indicates that the villagers had problems with rodents. So it is not strange to think that farmers benefited from the hunting of rodents by felines, which in the long run improved their relationship with each other.
The latest studies in this regard indicate that the 600 million domestic cats in the world today are descended from the Felis silvestris libica cat, a wild species present in Europe. In this regard, Marshall explains that ” if the Quanhucun cats were descendants of this species, it would indicate that they were domesticated elsewhere and later introduced to the region .”
In any case, there are still many unknowns in the air. As the researcher herself recalls: ” we still do not know if these cats came to China from the East , were interbred with other Asian feline species, or if the cats from China had a role in the domestication process.”
