It has taken a whilst for scientists to piece together the riddle of just when and the place cats first grew to become domesticated. One would assume that the archaeological document may reply the question easily, however wild cats and domesticated cats have remarkably similar skeletons, complicating the matter. Some clues first came from the island of Cyprus in 1983, when archaeologists discovered a cat’s jawbone dating back 8,000 years. Since it regarded fantastically not likely that humans would have introduced wild cats over to the island (a “spitting, scratching, panic-stricken wild pussycat would have been the closing form of boat associate they would have wanted,” writes Desmond Morris in Catworld: A Feline Encyclopedia), the finding advised that domestication took place earlier than 8,000 years ago.
In 2004, the unearthing of an even older web page at Cyprus, in which a cat had been intentionally buried with a human, made it even more positive that the island’s historical cats had been domesticated, and pushed the domestication date again at least another 1,500 years.
