Five-thousand-year-old cat bones found in a Chinese farming village have raised new questions about man’s complex rapport with domestic felines through history, said a study out Monday.

Cats are widely thought to have been domesticated in ancient Egypt and the Middle East some 4,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of a wild cat buried with a human on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus dates back even further, to about 10,000 years ago.

So to find evidence of a rapport between cats and humans in between those time periods, and in faraway China, came as a surprise, said lead researcher Fiona Marshall of Washington University.

“First of all, they are in the wrong place in terms of our old ways of thinking,” she told AFP.

Working with colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the team performed radiocarbon dating and isotope analysis on the bones, found in the village of Quanhucun.

More: Five-Thousand-Year-Old Cat Bones Discovered in China Raise New Questions About Domestication