The red fox is a wild animal – actually. Nevertheless, the presence of people has influenced their behavior and way of life. Findings from several caves in the Swabian Jura prove that this started 40,000 years ago. The Stone Age fox bones reveal that at that time some of these four-legged friends became the beneficiaries of humans: Instead of hunting small mammals, they ate slaughtering waste from the Stone Age reindeer hunters.
Humans have not only domesticated many animals in the course of their history, creating domestic and farm animals. The lives of some wild animals have also changed due to the spread and development of our species. Many animal species avoid us and have been displaced from their habitats. Others have become cultural followers that occur even in large cities today and have become accustomed to our present and the environment we have changed.
Foxes are opportunistic when it comes to food
The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is one of these opportunistic beneficiaries of humans. Although it lives wild and is also quite shy, you can still see it in the evening and at night in the outskirts of many cities. “Red fox and arctic fox are opportunists who eat the food that is most readily available to them,” explains Chris Baumann from the University of Tübingen and his colleagues. “Studies on these foxes show that the closer they live to a city or settlement, the more they eat human remains of food today.” In contrast, foxes in more remote areas feed mainly on small mammals.
But what was it like at the time when the first representatives of our ancestors came to Central Europe? To find out, Baumann and his colleagues examined one of the oldest found sites of human presence in Central Europe – the caves of the Swabian Jura. Representatives of Homo sapiens lived and hunted there around 42,000 years ago. In addition to tools, works of art and the remains of their animal food, the remains of the caves and their surroundings also include bones from the wild animals that lived in the area at the time. For their study, the researchers used isotope analyzes of the fox bones to determine what these animals ate in the area at the time of the Neanderthals and then after the arrival of our ancestors.
Remains of meat from the Stone Age people
The evaluations showed: Before our ancestors settled on the edge of the Swabian Jura, the foxes primarily hunted small mammals there. “That was how it was in the Middle Paleolithic more than 42,000 years ago,” says Baumann. “That was the time of the Neanderthals in southwestern Germany and the Swabian Alb was hardly populated.” But when Homo sapiens came to this area, a new ecological niche emerged for foxes: “We assume that these foxes are now mainly fed on meat waste that humans had left behind or maybe even fed by them, ”says Baumann’s colleague Hervé Bocherens.
The isotope signatures indicate that some of the foxes at that time were now beginning to eat the meat of larger animals such as mammoths and reindeer – prey that they could not hunt or kill themselves. But the Stone Age foxes didn’t have to either, because humans took this away from them. They hunted reindeer and mammoths and then, above all, cut up the large proboscis at the place of the hunt. This left plenty of bones and meat residues, which the foxes then used. “Our reconstruction of the diet of the Stone Age foxes shows that they used these resources effectively,” said the researchers.
However, this closeness to humans also harbored dangers: In one of the caves on the Swabian Alb, the researchers found the lower jaws of foxes, the bones of which showed signs of cuts. “This shows that people used the foxes’ meat and fur at the time,” said Baumann and his colleagues. Nevertheless, the studies suggest that the foxes’ career as a cultural follower of humans began around 40,000 years ago.
Source: University of Tübingen; Technical article: PloS ONE, doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0235692