Ancient Native Americans May Have Had Pet Bobcat [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Ancient Native Americans May Have Had Pet Bobcat

by Tia Ghose, Senior Writer | July 08, 2015 10:37am ET



A 2,000-year-old burial mound discovered in the area that's now Illinois contained the remains of a young bobcat, new research reveals.

The ancient bobcat was wearing a special collar and was found in a ritual burial mound normally reserved for humans.

"It really looked like it had been buried not because it was a feral accessory for a human, but because it was, in some way, kind of respected on its own," said study co-author Angela Perri, a zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. [In Photos: Urban Bobcats Stroll Through American Southwest]

Large culture

The bobcat's grave was part of a burial complex made by people from the Hopewell culture, a group of ancient American people who lived across an area that now makes up several states, all the way from Ohio to Florida. While each region had slightly varying ways of life and may have spoken different languages, people from the Hopewell culture had distinctive forms of pottery and art, such as animal-shaped tobacco pipes and shiny, micalike material carved into animal shapes, Perri said. People in the Hopewell culture also lived in villages with separate ritual burial mounds, such as the gigantic graveyard outside of Cahokia, near St. Louis, she added.

More:
http://www.livescience.com/51479-bobcat-buried-like-humans.html