Free The Intimate Bond by Brian Fagan

Shillourokambos, near Limassol on southern Cyprus. 5
    Unlike other early domesticated animals, independent-minded cats are not highly social. Their relationship with people is more commensal (sometimes commensual) than anything else, but their body shape, especially while kittens, appeals to the nurturing instincts of humans. (A commensal relationship is one where one species benefits, while the other is unaffected.) Cats were known as early as 3700 BCE in Egypt, where they became household pets valued for their successful hunting of both rodents and snakes and were sometimes buried carefully. 6 They were known as
miu
or
miut
(“he or she who mews”). By the New Kingdom (1530–1070 BCE ), they appear in tomb paintings hunting with their masters, retrieving bird and fish, or sitting by their mistresses’ chairs.
    Cats had powerful supernatural associations in Egypt. The cat goddess Bastet protected pregnant women and was patroness of dance and music. She was believed to protect people from disease and demons. Bastet was the personification of the warming rays of the sun, usually depicted as a woman with a cat’s head, holding the ankh, a type of cross symbolizing life. Her cult center and temple center were at Bubastis, in the Nile Delta. Many dead pets were mummified and buried, sometimes in a huge Bubastis catacomb, and elsewhere. A tomb discovered at Beni Hasan, in central Egypt, in 1888, contained an estimated eighty thousand cat burials. The Greek historian Diodorus noted in the first century BCE that deceased cats were “treated with cedar oil and such spices as have the quality of imparting a pleasant odour and of preserving the body for a long time.” 7 To kill a cat meant a sentence of death, as one unfortunate Roman, who killed one by accident, discovered in 47 BCE , when he was stoned to death.
    The Romans also revered cats, sometimes considering them household gods; indeed, they were the only animals allowed into temples. Romans respected them as rodent hunters and also considered them symbols of liberty. Roman armies carried cats with them through Gaul and eventually to Britain, to protect their grain supplies. Today, Rome is home to at least three hundred thousand feral cats, which live in the city’s monuments and were granted protection as part of Rome’s “bioheritage” in 2001.
    Pigs and Ancestors
    No one knows when people in New Guinea acquired pigs, but they are now a fundamental prop of local traditional societies and a classic example of how animals loom large in human existence. 8 Some seventhousand Maring-speaking farmers live in the New Guinea Highlands. Back in the 1960s, anthropologist Roy Rappaport lived among the Tsembaga group, whose lives were dominated by ancestor worship, warfare, and pig keeping. They formed part of a tapestry of allies and adversaries, their lives governed by the supernatural forces of their ancestors. Without the ancestors’ assistance, there would be no success in pig raising and other aspects of daily life. Tsembaga life, and that of their neighbors, revolved around an unfolding cycle of warfare and a ritual observance known as a
kaiko
, which culminated in a huge pig feast.
    Once a
kaiko
ends, with its gargantuan pig feed, there are few male beasts left. Warfare ceases. The living now direct their thoughts toward raising pigs. A rumbim shrub is planted, and grows until there is a renewed abundance of animals, at which point it is uprooted and the cycle begins anew.
Kaikos
occur about every twelve years, but the Tsembaga have no way of measuring time, so the timing of
kaikos
depends on social factors. The women grow yams, taro, and sweet potatoes, and also raise the pigs. Once weaned, piglets are trained to walk behind humans like dogs. At four or five months, they are released into the forest to scrounge for themselves until called home to be fed a daily ration of substandard yams and sweet potatoes. As the pigs mature and