[CAT] "Did Ancient Native Americans Try to Domesticate Bobcats?"

[rfmcdonald]

George Dvorsky's io9 post amused me.

The 2,000-year-old remains of a carefully decorated and deliberately buried juvenile bobcat has scientists wondering if it’s the first example of feline domestication in the prehistoric Americas.

The remains of the bobcat were originally discovered in the 1980s at the Illinois Hopewell Burial Mounds just north of St. Louis. Archaeologists had mistakenly identified the bones as belonging to a young dog and placed it in the archives of the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. Now, a new analysis by Ph.D. student Angela Perri and her team from the University of Durham in the UK, has correctly identified the bones as belonging to a bobcat (Lynx rufus) that was likely between four and seven months old when it perished. The results of their work can now be found at Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology.

Incredibly, the bobcat kitten was buried by a group of Middle Woodland Native Americans in a very human-like way, among the remains of humans and dogs. The bobcat was adorned with a necklace made from seashells, along with a bone carved to look like bear teeth (seen above). What’s more, the complete skeleton showed no signs of trauma, which suggests it wasn’t sacrificed.