Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/22/archaeological-evidence-that-thousands-of-years-ago-humans-domesticated-foxes.html
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I wonder if they had better tame foxes than we do; or if neolithic hunter-gathering is just more compatible with a sometimes malodorous pet that may decide to pee in your coffee mug just because reasons.
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Big difference between “tame” and “domesticated”: from Domestication - Wikipedia :
Domestication (not to be confused with the taming of an individual animal[3][4][5]), is from the Latin domesticus , ‘belonging to the house’.[6] The term remained loosely defined until the 21st century, when the American archaeologist Melinda A. Zeder defined it as a long-term relationship in which humans take over control and care of another organism to gain a predictable supply of a resource, resulting in mutual benefits.
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Keep dosing them with dog blood.
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I’m surprised that banjos were around thousands of years ago. Because you obviously need banjos for this task.
ETA: watching that fox’s body language really reminds me of the quote “a fox is CatOS running on Dog hardware”.
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It’s nice to see the participation points handed out in a 30 My game of ‘Domesticate This! Not That!’ The dependencies luckily don’t include having the animals all assembled instead of keeping others out of their ways, so few people need a Catbird to raise a Cat.
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I’m curious, did the human and fox die at the same time? Was there any evidence to suggest that the fox was killed in order to inter it in the same grave with it’s human?
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Stone Age Argentinian Kitsune is a manga just waiting to happen.
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I did the animal bone analysis of a circa 1500 BCE site in southern Ontario, and among the bones were those of a puppy, which were found in context with a child burial. Probably killed to keep the child company in the afterlife.
On the other hand, there is the Bonn-Oberkassel puppy (from about 14,000 years ago), who recovered from two bouts of canine distemper, and must have been cared for by humans, but succumbed to a third bout of distemper. The puppy was buried with two humans; a man and a woman. The puppy died of natural causes, but did it predecease the humans, or the other way around? Were they buried later, adjacent to the puppy? Unknown.
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But what did the foxes say?
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Pee if you’re lucky.
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