Yeah, I thought that looked like an extra 0 on the end, too, but maybe it is right, I don't know. I can't really think of a good reason for humans to have domesticated the cat before agriculture, though. Cats serve a useful purpose in keeping rats, mice and other small animals away from crops, but before crop-growing days, I can't think of a practical use for them except companionship or (yes it's nasty...) eating.

I reread the article and I think maybe it's just not very clear about what it's trying to say. I think what they really mean is that the species that became the domestic cat branched off from the other cat families at this time. From what they later say about cats first hanging around humans in order to prey on the vermin attracted to grain stores, well that surely can't have happened before the advent of arable agriculture.

I've always felt like the domestication of both cats and dogs could have started when primitive 'dad' came across a den of the babies and took some home alive ( to eat later and or maybe to amuse the 'lil cave rats in the interim ?). The kids got 'attached' and dad lost his meal.

Surely human children had the instinct or desire to play with something cute and furry long before the adults mastered agriculture.

Aye - it does say that they "started living with humans as early as 130,000 years ago" - if that is so, then there must have been some other impetus at work. I could go along with the cute pet theory quite easily, I've kept cats most of my life. On the other hand, we're probably looking at a society of highly mobile hunter-gatherers, I don't know how a cat would fit into that context.

Dunno

Just a thought with nothing, scientific evidence-wise, to back it up with:

In pre-agricultural times, those hunter-gatherers would have had to stockpile food for the winter, yes? Tubers, dried meat...which would attract rats and mice.

So cats would have been useful friends back then too. As to who domesticated who....could've have been the cats that decided to hang out with humans and their nice warm fires.

That makes sense, cats can be very food driven and would follow rodents and vermin as a food source.

I'm sure rodents have followed people for quite a while since we have a food source for them.

So it only follows that cats would eat the vermin around us. Even if they didn't interact much.

Eventually they joined society as helpers and companions.