The origins of the home cat is generally thought to date back to

A dog may be man’s best friend, but new archaeological evidence from Cyprus shows that the human relationship with cats is also very old, in fact, much older than thought. The discovery of a cat skeleton by French scientists pushes the known date of cats as pets back more than 5,000 years.
    The sound of the home cat has been familiar to people for ages. The ancient Egyptians are generally thought to have been the first to tame them, breeding them to produce a distinct new species about 4,000 years ago. But researchers have long suspected that wild cats began associating with humans much earlier, although they had limited evidence.
    Now, scientists from the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris have uncovered such clues. They uncovered the remains of a cat burial 9,500 years old on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. The cat skeleton was found alongside that of a human and a rich variety of offerings, and it showed no signs of butchering. This suggests that people had developed a special relationship with cats by that distant time.
    The discovery of the cat skeleton with the human skeleton is much stronger evidence of taming. The cat does not look different from a wild cat, but the context of the discovery shows the tight relationship between the man or woman and the cat.