Wands Poteat, age 10, of Gastonia, North Carolina, for her question:

Is it true that tame cats came from wild cats?

When the first human families arrived in the world, all the animals already there were what you would call wild animals    simply because nobody had tamed them. In those ancient times, a few of the animals were fairly friendly, but most of them hardly noticed people. A few were downright hostile and attacked people whenever they could. After many ages, a few animals came to trust human beings. In time, they became so tame and friendly that people adopted them.

The first animals were tamed long before people learned to read and write. So nobody reported the story and we can only guess what happened. Most experts suspect that the Stone Age people had half tame dogs at least 10,000 years ago. It seems that the wild ancestors of our tame cats lived in North Africa. There the Egyptians managed to tame them, perhaps 6,000 years ago. Later, the civilized Egyptians came to respect their tame cats as members of the family.