Cats have lived with humans for 5,000 years, new study says

Scientists claim to have found new evidence suggesting that cat domestication happened much longer ago than once thought.

Excavations at a Stone Age village in China have offered new insight into humans' relationships with felines, including when we began living with them.

The site is said to offer clues that the domestication of cats began as early as about 5,000 years ago. Dogs, by contrast, were domesticated much earlier by hunter-gatherer groups.

"What's really exciting about this study is it's the first evidence that shows us the processes by which cats came to live with humans," study author Fiona Marshall, of Washington University in St. Louis, told USA Today.

"Clearly they were the animals of farmers."

The researchers investigated a farming village in central China called Quanhucan. The town's garbage pits contained eight cat skeletons, two of which were more than 5,000 years old.

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The cats were found to have eaten grain — a lot of it — and to have lived relatively long lives, which suggests that humans could have been caring for them.

Cats, it is thought, began hanging out near farms as grain stores attracted tasty rodents. Farmers may have relied on the cats to kill the rodents and rewarded them with food and a more comfortable life.

"Even if these cats were not yet domesticated, our evidence confirms that they lived in close proximity to farmers, and that the relationship had mutual benefits," said Marshall.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.