Squeak!

The mus musculus came to Europe 4500 BC. This dead mouse lived in a Neolithic house in Serbia, which burned down about his small fuzzy ears.

Apparently there hadn't been evidence for a mouse so early across the Dardanelles. Mice had, of course, infested the earlier-agricultural Near East for many thousands of years prior.

Since reading in 2018ish that Yersinia Pestis hit the Balkan cities in the late 4000s BC - before the Sons of Aryas, if you like - I'd assumed we'd found that evidence already. Also the article notes cat domestication in Cyprus 7500 BC. It does, at least, seem as if researchers, from all that, now Knew Where To Look.

I assume this mouse is actually musculus musculus, the East European mouse; not the musculus domesticus which the article names. Domesticus is Rhineland and points west, I think.

I understand it was a Balkan custom in those days to burn down the town and start over. I figured in 2018-19 that this may have been the way the Balkan Neolithic handled plague-spreading vermin and the problem of debt.

...I wonder what "Old European Culture" blogger thinks of this.