The earliest domestic cat on the Silk Road

Haruda, AF, Ventresca Miller, AR, Paijmans, JLA, Barlow, A ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5532-9458, Tazhekeyev, A, Bilalov, S, Hesse, Y, Preick, M, King, T, Thomas, R, Härke, H and Arzhantseva, I, 2020. The earliest domestic cat on the Silk Road. Scientific Reports, 10: 11241. ISSN 2045-2322

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Abstract

We present the earliest evidence for domestic cat (Felis catus L., 1758) from Kazakhstan, found as a well preserved skeleton with extensive osteological pathologies dating to 775–940 cal CE from the early medieval city of Dzhankent, Kazakhstan. This urban settlement was located on the intersection of the northern Silk Road route which linked the cities of Khorezm in the south to the trading settlements in the Volga region to the north and was known in the tenth century CE as the capital of the nomad Oghuz. The presence of this domestic cat, presented here as an osteobiography using a combination of zooarchaeological, genetic, and isotopic data, provides proxy evidence for a fundamental shift in the nature of human-animal relationships within a previously pastoral region. This illustrates the broader social, cultural, and economic changes occurring within the context of rapid urbanisation during the early medieval period along the Silk Road.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Scientific Reports
Creators:	Haruda, A.F., Ventresca Miller, A.R., Paijmans, J.L.A., Barlow, A., Tazhekeyev, A., Bilalov, S., Hesse, Y., Preick, M., King, T., Thomas, R., Härke, H. and Arzhantseva, I.
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date:	2020
Volume:	10
ISSN:	2045-2322
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1038/s41598-020-67798-6 DOI 1343906 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2020. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Science and Technology
Record created by:	Jill Tomkinson
Date Added:	14 Jul 2020 13:10
Last Modified:	31 May 2021 15:19
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/40225

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