I Just Learned Why Humans Originally Kept Cats, And I'm Horrified

When I announce that I’m not really a pet person (and especially that I don’t particularly want a dog), people stare at me like I’m a criminal. 

But at least I’m not as vicious as the world’s first cat owners. 

Recently, a study published in bioRxiv has called into question the timeline of cat ownership.

Previously, scientists believed that cats became domesticated during the Neolithic period as African wildcats were drawn in by the cosy fires and abundance of food linked to farming, while humans welcomed their presence as they got rid of rodents.

But not only does this new paper suggest that this timing is off (the authors put it at the “first millennium BC” in Egypt), but it suggests the relationship believed to have existed between the first cat/human pairs was gorier than we thought.

Cats seem to have been bred for sacrifice first

The scientists looked at ancient cat remains found in a variety of spots across Europe and North Africa, including a 9,500-year-old site in Cyprus. 

Though these had previously been believed to show domesticated cats, a combination of carbon dating, genetic testing, and bone research suggests they were actually wildcats. 

Their results suggest that the “closening of human-cat relationships occurred more recently,” and appeared to have begun in Egypt for religious, and not practical, reasons.

Cats, they explain, are linked to the Egyptian goddess Bastet, who first appeared with a lion’s head, but was increasingly represented with the head of an African wildcat in later centuries. 

“This transformation was coincident with the rise of cat sacrifice, whereby millions of free-ranging and specifically-reared cats were mummified as offerings to the goddess,” they wrote. 

As statues dedicated to Bastet tended to be in more arable areas, the rodent-killing benefits of cats may have proven useful to humans and “provided the context for the tighter relationship between people and cats that led to the wildcat’s domestication, motivated by their newly acquired divine status”.

Still, the paper posits that we wanted them for sacrifices first; their more gentle and manageable traits were selected for easier handling.

That’s not all

As if that wasn’t horrific enough, it turns out Victorian-era Brits may have used those mummified cats for fertiliser. 

Speaking to BBC Science Focus, Dr Sean Doherty, the study’s lead author, said: “At temples dedicated to [Bastet], we find millions of mummified cats.

“There were so many that in the Victorian period, tonnes of them were brought back to Britain to be ground down and used for fertiliser.”