Cats Became Our Companions Way Later Than You Think

A John Deere tractor would be useful to a primitive agrarian society, but they didn't have one of those either.

We have plenty of evidence for domesticated cats 4,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt. We have no evidence for cats in earlier civilizations, so any assumption that they had them was a lazy guess - granted that we have fewer surviving artifacts from those eras anyway.

It's hard to prove a negative, but the recent discoveries seem to demonstrate that cats were in the middle of being domesticated in ancient Egypt. It doesn't completely rule out a line of domesticated cats in the Levant that since died out.

I think a better word than "useful" in the context of cats is "tolerated". The self-domestication hypothesis ala dogs makes a lot more sense than the active domestication of livestock.

There is some evidence to support this idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_the_Cat .

Have cats been domesticated as of 2025? Last time I had a cat at home 10 years ago, it felt like he domesticated me!

> I would guess that "most people" would think that cats were domesticated in Egypt because of their cat worship

Egyption cat worship is about on par with cat worship on the internet ca. 2005-2015. And most people on the internet don't even have grain stores that benefit from the protection of a cat. I certainly wouldn't have drawn a connection between "Ancient Egypt is long ago and they worshiped cats, thus they domesticated cats"

This is often the case. In the absence of clear, overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I find it best to accept what ancient writers say. In this case, Herodotus wrote about cats in Egypt and clearly thought them a fascinating novelty. If a well-traveled Greek from Halicarnassus thought that cats required several paragraphs of description and were something he specially associated with Egypt, it would seem pretty likely that a) cat domestication occurred in Egypt based on his full description and b) domesticated cats did not spread out of Egypt until quite late.

This happens again and again because nobody can make a career out of saying "yes, Herodotus/Thucydides/Polybius/etc were right." Well, at least not until many other people spend their careers writing about how they were wrong.

One fascinating passage in Herodotus's description mentions that cats were attracted to fire and would sometimes run into them and die. My edition describes this in a footnote as a ludicrous embellishment. I agreed...until I dated a girl who told me (unprompted, never having heard this) how her pet cat had done exactly this.

There were cat burials 10k years ago?

> 10k was roughly invention of agriculture and cats are super useful for rodent control

Grain means storable food but also... beer.

Cats and beer.

No.

That people need more than food and drink, they also need entertainment? And working for that is no less valuable than farming? But how is that related to cats?

I guess cats can provide companionship, which is valuable to a nomadic society. But so can dogs, and dogs have a bunch of other benefits. Cats are more useful when mice and rats start eating your food stores, and happily that's also when humans become useful to cats

While cats are a certified plague on wildlife, they actually suck as pest control. [1]. Mostly because they tend to go after easier prey. And animals like rats merely get more careful about showing themselves in the open, which may have led to the erroneous belief that cats lower their population.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327915473_Temporal_...

My neighbor had a barn cat that would come up to you and start head butting you and trying to take your food if we were eating on the deck. I'd have to periodically pick him up and take him to the other side of the house which would buy us about 10 minutes.

Another time I had summer company over and he must have sneaked in with doors opening and so forth because I found him later very comfortably situated in my bed.