Another Article on Ancient Cats

[QueenScoopalot]

http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/art...cats08-ON.html More on cats of days gone by.

[RICHARD]

I read this article this morning, I thought, "what a great PT thread....."

I have seen it four times on PT so I then thought about the numbers for keeping a cat for 9,500 years....

That's 104,250,000 little cans of cat food.

34,375,000 days of cat box cleaning.

4,940,000 ten lb bags of cat litter (10 lb bag a week.)

2,474,000 ten lb bags of cat food (10 lb bag every
2 weeks)

17,187,500 times to brush the cat (every other day)

4,940,000 hairballs at one a week.


and
finally....

1,588,659,546,983,546,417,653 times telling the
cat to stay off the table.

[lynnestankard]

Yep - heard it on the news this morning - what makes me think it was a slow mews day?!! **Cringe** Sorry!!!

Lynne

[RICHARD]

Originally posted by lynnestankard
Yep - heard it on the news this morning - what makes me think it was a slow mews day?!! **Cringe** Sorry!!!

Lynne

That was good!

There, we are even now!!!!!

[QueenScoopalot]

Mathematics wiz Richard? Very amusing answer. Jan

[QueenScoopalot]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/science/09cat.html

Ancient Body's Buddy: An Early House Cat?
Published: April 9, 2004

If it can truly be said that people train cats, rather than the other way
around, human-feline bonding apparently had its start at least 9,500 years
ago - about 5,000 years earlier than previously thought.

French archaeologists, excavating a grave in Cyprus, have found the remains of
a person, some buried offerings and the curled-up skeleton of a cat.
Everything about the grave, dated at about 7500 B.C., suggested to the
discoverers that the cat probably had as favored a place in the life of the
departed person as that of your dear Daddles or Willie or whatever the name of
the little master of the house. If the interpretation is valid, and other
experts think it is, then cat domestication probably began with some of the
first farmers in the Middle East - and opportunistic prototypes of Tom and
Jerry. When the farmers first settled into villages and stored their harvests
of domesticated grain, mice came to nibble the grain and wild cats descended
on the mice, settling into a life that benefited them and their human hosts.

In the journal Science published Friday, the French archaeologists, led by Dr.
Jean-Denis Vigne of the Natural History Museum in Paris, report that the grave
is likely to represent "early evidence for the taming of cats." This
demonstrates, they said, that a close relationship between people and cats
developed at least 5,000 years before the Egyptian elite were known to pamper
cats as palace pets, revered goddesses and sleek objects of art.

Egyptian art and mummified cats, beginning before 2000 B.C., had been the
earliest clear evidence of cats in human culture, though scholars had
suspected a deeper history. Stone or clay figurines of cats found in Syria,
Turkey and Israel encouraged speculation of a link between cat domestication
and the origins of agriculture in the region, even before 7500 B.C. The island
of Cyprus is a short distance from the mainland.

The human and feline skeletons, lying less than 18 inches apart, were buried
at the same depth and in the same sediment and were similarly preserved. They
were presumably buried at the same time, the archaeologists said, and perhaps
the cat was killed so it could accompany its owner into the afterworld.

"The burial of a complete cat without any signs of butchering reminds us of
human burials and emphasizes the animal as an individual," Dr. Vigne's group
wrote. "The joint burial could also imply a strong association between two
individuals, a human and a cat."

The presence of tools, polished stones and jewelry in the grave, the
archaeologists said, suggested that the buried person had a special social
status and that the close human-feline relationship "was not restricted to the
material benefit of humans but also involved spiritual links."

Dr. Melinda A. Zeder, a zooarchaeologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of
Natural History who was not connected with the study, praised the findings.
"In lieu of finding a bell around its neck," she said in an interview, "this
is about as solid evidence as one can have that cats held a special place in
the lives and afterlives of residents of this site."

Other research has shown that sheep, goats and pigs were domesticated in the
Middle East more than 10,000 years ago. Archaeologists said that because no
evidence for wild cats had been found on Cyprus, the animals were probably
introduced from the mainland in some stage of tamed behavior. The cat in the
grave belonged to the Felis silvestris species, a type of wildcat, and was
larger than today's house cats. The dog as man's best friend has an even
longer history. By at least 13,000 years ago, wolves chose domestication as a
rewarding way of life.

No doubt the next challenge for science will be to fathom the mind of cats. Is
it really true, as T.S. Eliot imagined, that cats in their most inscrutable
reveries are deep into long division?

[RICHARD]

Originally posted by RICHARD
1,588,659,546,983,546,417,653 times telling the
cat to stay off the table.

OK, THIS one is an estimate.