In the past decade, archaeologists have uncovered evidence that foxes may have been kept as pets thousands of years ago, or at least tolerated for human settlement.
To learn more about the relationship between foxes and our ancestors, I spoke with an archaeologist and a zoologist about the latest scientific findings and what they mean for our understanding of animal domestication in human history.
Fox burials
The most recent study of archaeological burials where both foxes and humans were found has taken place in Spain. The site belonged to an agricultural society, one that grew barley and pulses and tended livestock such as sheep and cattle.
Researchers from several institutes and universities analyzed the bones collected from the burial site. They studied isotopes found in collagen preserved in bones, which can provide information about individuals’ diets. In human bones, we can learn about an adult’s diet in the last five to 10 years of life. In young adult dogs, diet data range from six months to three years.
The first significant finding was how many fox bones the researchers found, as explained by Aurora Grandal-d’Anglade, lead researcher and full professor at the University of A Coruña.
“The fox was already a striking find, since only domestic animals were found in the Can Roqueta burials,” he said. “Later, when collaborating with researchers elsewhere, they saw that there were more cases, and that was key to considering foxes as having a special value.”
The results show that the foxes had a diet similar to that of some of the humans and dogs. This suggests a higher level of interaction than previously assumed between these societies and foxes 4,000 years ago.
In addition, the team found something surprising: one of the four foxes, the one with the most human-like diet (high amounts of plant protein), had healed the broken bones. The manner in which the bones were healed is compatible with the immobilization of fractured bones, presumably by humans.
“The healed fracture in the fox’s leg was a finding that caught the attention of the team working at Can Roqueta from the moment of the excavation,” said Grandal-d’Anglade. “When I came to collaborate with the zooarchaeologists on the isotopic analyses, we predicted for the fox a slightly different isotopic signature than a wild carnivore, but it turned out to be more special than expected.”
In addition to finding similarities between the diet of foxes and that of humans and their dogs, the researchers found that, in the case of the injured fox, its diet contained a significant amount of plant protein. This diet is similar to that of young local dogs, rich in cereals. This could indicate that the fox was being fed by humans, at least for a while before its death. However, the isotopic signature is not specific enough to verify this.
Although studying a much older burial, approximately 15,000 years old, a similar study in Germany and Switzerland also found differences between the diet of foxes surrounding human settlements and wild foxes. In that study, however, the fox’s diet was still quite different from that of humans, indicating a commensal relationship, where foxes obtained food scraps from humans, one way or another.
Around the same time, approximately 13,000 years ago in the Levant, a careful burial took place: the burial of a human with a fox. Both bones were treated with red ocher (a treatment not given to the other bones found at the burial site), indicating some kind of significance of the fox in contrast to the other animals. Also, the burial was later reopened and the bones moved to another location, but the man and the fox stayed together through these different burials.
This study, published 10 years ago, analyzed the composition of the burial site. Notably, the date of this unique human fox burial predates the appearance of domesticated dogs in the region. Of course, figuring out the social meanings of a human society that existed thousands of years ago is a complex task. However, it is not difficult to imagine that at some point foxes may have been seen as analogous to dogs and of some potential utility in keeping them.
Adaptable animals
As Kat Black, an assistant instructor of biology at Radford University who has studied foxes living in and around human areas, commented, foxes are very adaptable.
“As opportunistic omnivores, foxes have a very flexible diet and can take advantage of anthropogenic food resources such as leftovers from unsecured garbage cans, compost piles, pet food, etc.,” Black explained. “They can also take advantage of high densities of prey species such as mice and rats. Unlike some species that require large areas of old-growth forest or virgin wetlands to thrive, red foxes will readily use a wide variety of types of habitat and seem to particularly like edge habitats and areas where several different habitat types are close together.”
Whether foxes in the past lived only near human settlements or were kept (or allowed) around them, urban foxes are a phenomenon to which we can find analogues in more recent times.
Records of foxes in urban areas are present in both the 19th and 20th centuries. Records of urban foxes are found in both native and introduced areas: Melbourne in the 1940s, Stockholm in the early 1960s and Brussels in the early 1970s, for example.
In general, these urban foxes were not well received. As Black explained, living alongside foxes isn’t necessarily easy.
“For people, red foxes can become a nuisance when their activities interfere with human ideals,” he said. “Raising bins, raiding gardens, burrowing under porches and sheds and defecating in gardens is normal red fox behaviour, but not everyone is willing to tolerate such unruly neighbours. People may also have concerns about the fox’s health impacts and the safety of people and pets. Fox attacks on people, dogs and cats are rare, but foxes can carry rabies and other diseases that can be transmitted to people and the animals they care for.”
However, there are records of foxes being domesticated and kept as pets. In Finland, a country with many records of foxes living in or around urban centers, there are also reports of some tame urban foxes being captured and kept as pets. For example, in 1921, a fox was captured in the Turku city barracks and kept as a pet.
Time to revisit the old dig sites
It’s not hard to imagine how similar situations have occurred throughout history when someone decided to keep a fox as a pet (or perhaps wanted its fur after it grew up). But unfortunately, there’s still a lot we don’t know.
To answer the question of why our ancestors did not domesticate foxes as they did dogs, we still have a long way to go. It is possible, however, that some of the critical remains have already been unburied, waiting to be analyzed with new techniques and an open mind, said Grandal-d’Anglade.
“It is quite possible that the skeletal remains of foxes that have been found in archaeological contexts have been classified directly as the remains of hunted animals without considering other hypotheses. The idea that the fox was simply a wild animal is prevalent among archaeologists, but in my opinion, it is a preconceived idea,” he said. “If only domestic animals are included in the burial structures, the presence of a fox may indicate a close relationship with the buried human being… But when we approach an archaeological context, we need to pay attention to various types of evidence. We studied the diet of these foxes and found that it was like that of dogs, and even similar to that of children. Hence our suggestion that these foxes were not entirely wild animals. Perhaps if we review more sites from this point of view, we could find similar cases. “
@M_Gatta