The fox, once man’s best friend
FOXES may once have been man’s best friends, new archaeological findings suggest. Cambridge University scientists have been reading into a prehistoric grave in Jordan where a fox was buried with a human.
They say: “It suggests that long before we began to hunt foxes, our ancestors were keeping them as pets – earlier than their canine relatives.”
The grave appears to be 4,000 years older than the earliest known human-dog burial. The report is in the open-access journal, PLoS One. It says it is unlikely foxes were ever domesticated in full and they would have fallen out of favour when humans “tried the more companionable dog instead”.