14 DAY TRIAL // New archaeological evidences would appear to suggest that the dog became man's best friend millennia after it was first domesticated. Data collected from a prehistoric burial ground in Jordan indicated that early humans preferred the company of foxes to that of dogs.
The conclusion was drawn after investigators looked closely at all the remnants found buried at the Jordan site. One of the most amazing discoveries was that of a human being buried next to a fox.
Studies determined that a part of the fox was then transferred to another grave, that was located nearby. Experts believe that this is indubitable proof that foxes played an important role in the prehistoric human society.
Archaeologists with the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, believe that this type of funeral rite hints at a very close and deep connection that may have existed between humans and foxes at the time the individuals filling those two graves died.
In a paper the experts published yesterday, January 27, they argue that the fox found in the grave was most likely a pet, and that it was buried with its human in order to accompany them in the afterlife.
This research provides evidence that foxes were preferred to dogs long before the canines began being used to hunt them. The finding is the first to attest to the burial of an animal with its master.
The northern Jordan site is called Uyun-al-Hammam and is in fact a 16,500-year-old cemetery. This means that the fox uncovered by the researchers was buried 4,000 years before the first known human-dog burial. The event also took place 7,000 years ahead of the next known fox burial.
Overall, it could be that this animal funeral hints at the growing cultural sophistication that our ancestors were going through at that point in time, the experts write in the journal PLoS ONE.
“The burial site provides intriguing evidence of a relationship between humans and foxes which predates any comparable example of animal domestication,” explains Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies expert Dr Lisa Maher.
“What we appear to have found is a case where a fox was killed and buried with its owner. Later, the grave was reopened for some reason and the human's body was moved,” she adds.
“But because the link between the fox and human had been significant, the fox was moved as well, so that the person, or people, would still be accompanied by it in the afterlife,” the expert goes on to say.
This type of sophistication was usually associated with the farming societies of the Neolithic era, which did not appear until several thousand years later. On the other hand, the Cambridge team says, foxes were not preferred to dogs for a long time.
In all likelihood, early humans never fully managed to domesticate the animals, and so they turned to the more malleable dogs instead. It took several millennia to fully domesticate them, but the effort was well worth it.