Mice shared our homes even before farming

摘要

THE close relationship between house mice and humans began in the earliest settlements about 15,000 years ago - before the advent of farming that made our crops such a draw for the rodents. 'The question that interests us is: do house mice become associated with humans due to farming or before farming?" says Lior Weissbrod at the University of Haifa, Israel. To find out, his team collected 272 mouse teeth from 14 archaeological sites in Israel dating from 200,000 to 10,000 years ago. From these, they identified two species: the house mouse and its short-tailed relative, the Macedonian mouse.