Pinpointing when animals became our companions is harder than it sounds. Every fossil find and genetic study tweaks what we think we know about the timeline or the circumstances under which domestication occurred. When it comes to cats, the story is still evolving. Scientists continue to debate where and how our feline friends first went from wild hunters to household companions.
For a long time, ancient Egypt was thought to be the starting point — home of cat worship, divine felines, and famous mummified remains. But that idea was shaken by the discovery of a more-than 9,000-year-old grave on the island of Cyprus, where a cat was buried alongside a human. The age of the burial predates any known Egyptian records, hinting that cat domestication could have begun somewhere else.
In a pair of preprint studies posted in March 2025 to bioRxiv, European researchers recently revisited this question — and introduced a gruesome theory: maybe cats were first tamed not to be pets, but to be sacrificed.
