Cats Were Kept In China 5 Millennia Ago

This is Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber. This'll just take a minute.
Cats and humans have been adopting each other for millennia.
Four-thousand-year-old Egyptian art provides evidence of cat domestication.
A 9,500-year-old grave in Cyprus revealed a wildcat near a human.
But the act of domestication in between those periods has been fuzzy in the archaeological record.
Now research from China fills in some of the gap.
In the remains of a 5,300-year-old agricultural village, scientists found eight bones that belonged to at least two cats.
The date is 3,000 years earlier than previous estimates of Chinese cat domestication.
The researchers analyzed human, cat and rodent bones.
The size the cats indicates domestication, as they're smaller than their wild European relatives.
Isotopes showed they'd all eaten a fair amount of millet.
One of the cats lived to a particularly old age, while the other ate less meat and more millet than a cat might prefer.
The research is in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists theorize the cats were attracted to rodents and grain in villages, and that people cared for the cats to help control the rodents.
Thus creating the mutually beneficial relationship that cats and people still enjoy.
Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American 60-Second Science. I'm Cynthia Graber.