Jerry Moore

I think that cats fall into this category of what we think of as charismatic species.

And this is a term that comes out of wildlife biology for animals, and in some cases plants, that seem to really attract human attention.

Yeah, that's one of the most interesting and improbable events that I know of in my studies of archeology.

I mean, it's one of the least likely events because on the one hand, what happens is that every continent with the exception of Australia and Antarctica has a small wild cat that you would think would be suitable for domestication.

But in fact, all of our domesticated cats are derived from one species of cat that was found in North Africa and in the Near East.

And then not only domesticated, but then spread around the world and in many places with terrible consequences.

But the process by which that transformation from absolutely wild animal to one that's curled up at your feet,

is one of the most enigmatic events in human prehistory.

Because on the one hand, it takes place when humans start not only raising their own food, but more particularly raising grains and storing them to be used throughout the year.

So you have like large storage of harvests.

But the ironic thing is that that sort of process occurs in different places around the world, including, for example, in ancient Mexico and Guatemala, Mesoamerica, or the Andes.

And in those places also, there are wild cats that you would think, well, maybe they would have been attracted to the pests that occupy storage bins of corn and things like that, but they weren't.

Because there's this other bizarre thing that happens, is that it's not just the fact that people are grazing grain, particularly wheat and barley in the Near East, and then storing it.

But at the same time, what we think of as the house mouse, Mus musculus, begins expanding out of the Himalayas of all places.

westward into the Near East and the Middle East.

And that animal goes into the storage bins, starts reproducing, and creates enough of a dietary basis to attract the wildcats in to eat those mice.

As far as we know, they come in naturally at first because they're scenting out or they're looking for this dense food supply.

But very quickly, human beings not only begin to try to control the breeding of cats, which is a virtually impossible thing to do until you have modern veterinary medicine.

But they are treating cats as pets and we can tell it from very early on.

So we've got, for example, 10,000 year old burials on the island of Crete where a young man in his 20s is dead.