July
10
/ 2020
Archaeologists have found the well-preserved remains of a Silk Road cat buried in Kazakhstan that likely dates from the 8th century AD, and the evidence suggests this was a “well-loved pet cat.” In a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports by Dr. Ashleigh Haruda from the Central Natural Science Collections at Germany’s Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, she provides compelling evidence about the life of this ancient Silk Road cat, a male, which was fed by the people it lived near and “nursed back to health by his nomadic cattle-herding owners after getting injured.” Today, an estimated 600 million cats share homes with their human servants and a 2007 report stated that about 37 million US households owned cats, with
