The History of the Cats
The History of the Cats
By Andrew McGregor
Archaeologists have estimated that the ancestors of cats date back to 200 million years ago. The ancestors of cats are a group of meat eating animals that include the tiger, panther, leopard, lion and cheetah, all of these being skillful hunters. These animals all fit into the ‘felius catus’ family. They have extraordinary senses including hearing, sight and smell which are up to 10 times better than human senses. Scientists estimate that the domestic cat that we know today have been around for roughly 2 million years.
No one knows for sure, but most people believe that the Egyptians were the first ones to tame the wild cat in around 3500bc. These tamed cats were not just pets but were used to protect farms and gainery’s from being over-run by pests including mice, rats, cockroaches and snakes and any other animals that were harmful to their grains. About 2000 years later the domestic cats were considered sacred and were worshiped by the people of Egypt. Laws were made against harming cats and anyone who did were executed. At one point they were considered above royalty and the pharaoh. When a cat died the family that owned it shaved of their eyebrows as a symbolic of the person’s mourning. The family then went to a sacred ceremony where the cat was mummified and placed in a temple or a tomb. There were eventually more cat mummies than human mummies around Egypt and archaeologists found a single tomb containing more than 250 000 cat mummies.
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