Mice infested human settlements 15,000 years ago

MIAMI: Mice began infesting human settlements some 15,000 years ago in the Middle East, said a study on Tuesday that suggested the little rodents have been scurrying underfoot far longer than previously thought.

As soon as hunter-gatherers began settling down rather than roving from place to place, house mice began to edge out their wild counterparts, said the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer-reviewed US journal.

"The research provides the first evidence that, as early as 15,000 years ago, humans were living in one place long enough to impact local animal communities -- resulting in the dominant presence of house mice," said co-author Fiona Marshall, a professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Previous research has pointed to the rise of farming as the starting point for transforming human relations with the animal world.

In hunter-gatherer villages in the eastern Mediterranean region, house mice were common more than 3,000 years before the earliest known evidence for agriculture, said the findings.

When hunter gatherers settled in one place, they provided shelter and regular access to crumbs and scraps. Mice would learn to benefit from this and would stick around, marking an early phase of domestication.