Find provides grave paws for thought

The discovery of ancient bones in a village in Shaanxi province may challenge widely accepted theories about the earliest relationships between felines and humans, as Zhang Lei reports.

For many cat lovers, the best thing about felines is their unpredictability; sometimes they act as though they worship their "owners", but often they behave as though they have been carved from an iceberg, implacable and devoid of compassion. That unpredictability raises the question of why humans tolerated such capricious behavior in the first place.

Archeological evidence strongly suggests that the ancient Egyptians worshipped cats at least 4,000 years ago, elevating them to the status of gods and keeping them as life companions. Paintings in pyramids seem to support a general belief that the ancient Egyptians were the first humans to domesticate cats, setting an example to the rest of the world, which gradually caught up.