People have had pets for thousands of years, both dogs and cats.

Ancient Egyptians kept cats as companions, worshiped them as gods, and used them for pest control.  Egyptians even made some of their cats into mummies when they died.

Now scientists think that they have found the world's oldest known pet cat. This animal lived 4,000 years before these ancient Egyptians.

Scientists recently discovered the remains of a human and a cat in a 9,500-year-old grave on Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean Sea.

The burial of this animal with a human makes a strong case that cats had a special place in the daily lives, and in the afterlives, of the people on the island.

Usually it's hard to say whether cat bones buried near human bones belong to pets or to strays since wild cats often lived near people because they were attracted to the rats and mice that fed on human food.

Plus, our pet cats are physically very similar to prehistoric wild cats, so it's hard to tell whether ancient bones come from a pet feline or a wild one.

But this cat discovered on Cyprus is different. It was buried just 16 inches from a human. The human and the cat were buried together with seashells, polished stones, and other cherished items.

"With this discovery, we can now decide that cats were linked with humans much earlier than previously thought," said Jean-Denis Vigne of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

So are cats really man's best friend?

It’s a toss up, but dogs still appear to have been pets much earlier than cats - at least right now. Scientists have found evidence of pet dogs from 12,000 years ago.

But both dogs and cats have been our extremely loyal friends for an extremely long time – and we should all start treating them with the respect they truly deserve.