Researchers discover 6,200 year old cat remains in Poland where the animals lived on the periphery of human farming settlements ‘somewhere between wild and domesticated’
- Cat bones were discovered in four caves in southern Poland dating to 4,200 BCE
- The bones are one of the earliest examples of cats living in northern Europe
- Analysis of the bones show they lived mostly on foraged rodents, not yet fully domesticated but no longer completely wild either
Researchers in Poland have discovered the remains of a cat which could date as far back as 4,200 BCE, an ‘unexpected’ discovery that suggests cats had spread through Europe much farther and earlier than previously thought.
The discovery was made by a team of archaeozoologists from Nicolaus Copernicus University, who excavated four caves in southern Poland that had been sites of early farming settlements.
Buried in layers of sediment beside ceramic vessels, the team found the humerus of a cat, which they were surprised to learn could be more than 6,200 years old.
‘We expected to find cat remains not older than the beginning of the Common Era, because that was suggested by other archeological finds from Europe,’ team lead Magdalena Krajcarz told Inverse.
‘The Neolithic age of these cats was something we didn’t even consider as a hypothesis.’
The oldest known evidence of cats in Europe was a sample found in Cyprus believed to be 9,500 years old, but there’s scant evidence of cats living near humans in central or Northern Europe.
The ancestors to the modern house cat lived alongside Neolithic farmers in a region known as the Fertile Crescent, which runs from Egypt through southern Turkey and down the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to the Persian Gulf.
Neolithic farmers from this region lived with domesticated dogs and livestock, including goats, sheep, and cows.
Cats existed as a kind of satellite species, orbiting these settlements and feeding on rodents and other small animals that were attracted to the fields and stores of grains.
Krajcarz frdescribes cats from this period as ‘staying somewhere between being wild and domesticated, and possibly also feral.’
‘For millennia, cats were only natural allies of humans in their constant fight against rodents, rather than domesticated pets.’
As these Neolithic farmers began migrating northward, cats appear to have followed along without ever having become fully integrated or domesticated into their communities.
Farmers from the Fertile Crescent first appear to have arrived in Poland a little over 6,000 years ago, just around the same period the cat samples were from.
The team analyzed the chemical makeup of the bone samples and compared it to samples from 34 other species found in the region.
The isotopes indicate the cats diet at the time was similar to that of other wildcats found in the region that lived entirely separate from human settlements, indicating that the cats likely still hadn’t been domesticated.
It’s still unclear when and how cats ended up being domesticated in Europe, and what larger shifts in culture and lifestyle might have accompanied that shift.
The team hopes that their new finding will help inspire new research across Europe and bring about a new renaissance in ancient cat analysis.
‘We are not giving up on cats,’ Krajcarz said. ‘This is just the beginning of a more in-depth study of cat history.’