Cats have been our faithful friends for a long time, well before even medieval times. According to Smithsonian.com, it has taken some time to piece together the riddle of cats and their domestication; they have come to a tentative conclusion that we have lived side-by-side with them for around 12,000 years.

“Some clues first came from the island of Cyprus in 1983, when archaeologists found a cat’s jawbone dating back 8,000 years, they write. “Since it seemed highly unlikely that humans would have brought wild cats over to the island (a spitting, scratching, panic-stricken wild feline would have been the last kind of boat companion they would have wanted), the finding suggested that domestication occurred before 8,000 years ago.”

“In 2004, the unearthing of an even older site at Cyprus, in which a cat had been deliberately buried with a human, made it even more certain that the island’s ancient cats were domesticated and pushed the domestication date back at least another 1,500 years.”

More recently, a study published in the research journal Science secured more pieces in the cat-domestication puzzle based on genetic analyses. “All domestic cats,” the authors declared, “descended from a Middle Eastern wildcat, Felis sylvestris, which literally means “cat of the woods.”

Cats were first domesticated in the Near East, and some of the study authors speculate that the process began up to 12,000 years ago.

So there you have it. We have lived together with our feline friends for millennia, yet they still act like they hardly know us half of the time!