Cats
Wildcats move into grain stores to hunt rodents, and largely domesticate themselves.
- When
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
A cat buried alongside a human at Shillourokambos on Cyprus around 7500 BCE is the earliest good evidence of the relationship — Cyprus had no native cats, so it was carried there deliberately. Grain storage attracts mice, mice attract wildcats, and the tamest tolerate people best. Cats are barely altered by domestication compared with dogs or cattle: they remain solitary hunters, and their genomes differ only slightly from wild Felis silvestris lybica.