Comment by dmurray
11 hours ago
A John Deere tractor would be useful to a primitive agrarian society, but they didn't have one of those either.
We have plenty of evidence for domesticated cats 4,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt. We have no evidence for cats in earlier civilizations, so any assumption that they had them was a lazy guess - granted that we have fewer surviving artifacts from those eras anyway.
It's hard to prove a negative, but the recent discoveries seem to demonstrate that cats were in the middle of being domesticated in ancient Egypt. It doesn't completely rule out a line of domesticated cats in the Levant that since died out.
> We have plenty of evidence for domesticated cats 4,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt.
We have plenty of evidence for cats being around humans 4,000 years ago—domestication is another topic entirely. Even now you can find big cats living alongside humans clearly without domestication.