Paw Prints on Ancient Manuscript Show Cats Haven't Changed

From being revered as symbols of Ancient Egyptian gods to being linked with witches in the Middle Ages to completely dominating the Internet today, cats have long been a part of human history. It can be difficult to picture how cats and humans might have interacted in the distant past. But the discovery of inky paw prints scrawled across the pages of a centuries-old manuscript pretty much assures us that cats have always been what they are: cats. 

While pawing through a stack of medieval manuscripts from Dubrovnik, Croatia, a doctoral student by the name of Emir O. Filipović stumbled upon an all-too-familiar set of prints across the aged pages. 

Filipović shared the photo and it soon gained Internet notoriety, as cat memes are wont to do. But Filipović's discovery is more than just a cute cat meme, it is a captured moment in history that is all too relatable to our modern day cat lovers! 

"The photo of the cat paw prints represents one such situation which forces the historian to take his eyes from the text for a moment, to pause and to recreate in his mind the incident when a cat, presumably owned by the scribe, pounced first on the ink container and then on the book, branding it for the ensuing centuries.

You can almost picture the writer shooing the cat in a panicky fashion while trying to remove it from his desk. Despite his best efforts the damage was already complete and there was nothing else he could have done but turn a new leaf and continue his job. In that way this little episode was ‘archived’ in history."