This May Be The Oldest Pet Cemetery In The World

Ten years ago, in the early Roman port of Berenice in Egypt, archaeozoologist Marta Osypinska and her colleagues discovered a grave site just outside the city walls, beneath a Roman trash dump. But it wasn’t people that were buried in this site. Rather, the remains at this site were that of animals. In 2017, about a hundred remains of animals — most of them being cats — were unearthed by Osypinska and her team. At the present, the team has already excavated about 600 animals in the site, which could be considered the oldest pet cemetery in the world. 

“I’ve never encountered a cemetery like this,” says Michael MacKinnon, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Winnipeg who has studied the role of animals across the bygone Mediterranean but was not involved with the new work. “The idea of pets as part of the family is hard to get at in antiquity, but I think they were [family] here.”
[...]
“We have individuals who have very limited mobility,” Osypinska says. Yet many lived long lives and their injuries healed. “Such animals had to be fed to survive,” she says, “sometimes with special foods in the case of the almost-toothless animals.”
[...]
The fact that humans took such good care of the animals, especially in a rough-and-tumble region where almost all resources had to be imported—and that they took such care in burying them, just as many modern owners do—suggests the people of Berenice had a strong emotional bond with their cats and dogs, the team concluded last month in World Archaeology. “They weren’t doing it for the gods or for any utilitarian benefit,” Osypinska says. Instead, she argues that the relationship between people and their pets was “surprisingly close” to the one we see today.

More about this over at Science Magazine.

(Image Credit: M. Osypinska/ Science Magazine)


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