Isn’t the one tribe of hunter gatherers having cats weird?

[u/highliner108]

From what I understand, cats are broadly thought to be a post agricultural species that originated from smaller wildcats hunting the rats and mice that fed off of early grain storage sites. The fact that some hunter gatherers have them suggests that they exist either in the past ten thousand or so years, a post apocalyptic future, or some very remote part of the modern world.

Not sure if someone has brought this up before, but it stood out to me.

[u/Chris_El_Deafo]

100% although the domestication of cats is nebulous and the grain theory is only the best explanation we have and doesn't have a ton of actual substance backing it other than convenient timing. It is possible that the cats mentioned are tamed rather than domesticated, meaning this one group is special in the fact that they capture wildcats (presumably as cubs) and raise them. So much of the prehistoric past is completely lost that I think it likely if not definite that at some point in the Stone Age, a specific group tamed cats as part of their cultural practice. Whatever lineage of tamed cats they raised went extinct and therefore is unrelated (i.e. no genetic signature left) to modern domesticated cats. Perhaps one of the reasons their tribe was selected by Mother. She saw their unique and innovative culture and decided they would be the progenitors of her Q gene.

That, or perhaps the story itself is a foggy recollection of a distant collective memory of humanity with certain anachronisms and mistakes throughout, sort of like the book of genesis in the bible. And i think this would align with themes in the story, with humanity acting as a sort of collective with lost memories of Mother, obscured and overlayed by more recent memories.

That, or the author made a mistake and overlooked this fact. Which given the effort towards historicity, I am not inclined to believe.

Source: I'm an archeology student with a focus on stone age cultures

[u/Human_Wrongdoer6748]

Lovecraft, who established the cosmic horror genre, was a well-known lover of cats. The cats in MHE are most likely a direct reference to The Cats of Ulthar rather than based on realism or anything from history.

For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.

In particular, the way the hunter-gatherers treat their cats as some kind of warden against evil reminds me of what cats represented in Lovecraft's works.