These days, dogs are known as “man’s best friend.” There’s no house or corner of the world where they aren’t valued and cared for. However, long ago, there were groups of humans who lived alongside a type of fox.
Hard as it might be to believe, these small animals were considered good companions—more than just pets. This fact was discovered through an in-depth analysis of ancient DNA and radiocarbon dating, which revealed that the fox remains had eaten the same food as this group of humans.
Foxes Were Once Man’s Best Friend, According to a Study
A study conducted by researchers from Conicet, public universities in La Rioja, and La Plata in Argentina, along with colleagues from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the Graduate School of Life Sciences in Munich, Germany, found that foxes were faithful companions to humans. During an excavation at the Cañada Seca-1 site in San Rafael, Mendoza, they discovered human remains and those of an animal. Initially, researchers suspected it was a dog. But recent reanalysis of the remains using mitochondrial DNA revealed it was a fox.
The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence from burial sites on other continents indicating that individual foxes were domesticated by humans and shared a bond based on companionship.
A Unique Discovery in the Life of Hunter-Gatherers
The thorough examination of the remains helped identify what species it was, and the samples suggest that it wasn’t a dog that was the best friend of humans, but a specimen of Dusicyon avus. A native South American mammal species, it’s known as the “continental wolf-fox,” but no one knows what it was called by the hunter-gatherers who lived in the region 1,500 years ago, in what is now Mendoza. Dusicyon avus lived from the Pleistocene (between 2.6 million and 11,700 years ago) through the Holocene, eventually going extinct about 500 years ago. It was about the size of a modern German Shepherd but much less bulky, weighing up to 15 kilograms (33 pounds).
The analysis also sheds light on what might have led to these foxes’ extinction—or rather, what didn’t. One hypothesis suggested that the foxes interbred with dogs brought to South America by European colonists and that the interbreeding ultimately caused the fox lineage to die out. However, the fox’s DNA told a different story, indicating a lack of fertile offspring, according to the study’s authors. With a similar diet to that of D. avus, dogs might have accelerated the extinction of foxes by outcompeting them. Dogs might also have carried and transmitted diseases that sickened the foxes.
This story was written in Spanish by Perla Vallejo in Ecoosfera.
