Pet fox with 'deep relationship with the hunter-gatherer society' buried 1,500 years ago in Argentina

Hunter-gatherers in what is now Patagonia, Argentina, kept foxes as Pets before the arrival of European dogs about 500 years ago, a new study suggests. In some cases, the ancient people were so closely bonded with their Pet foxes that they were even buried with them.

And while it's previously been proposed that modern dogs in the region are a mixture of foxes and dogs, that probably isn't the case — instead, it seems the foxes died out completely.

The new study, published Wednesday (April 10) in the journal Royal Society Open Science, describes the examination of a grave at the Cañada Seca site, about 130 miles (210 kilometers) south of the western city of Mendoza.

Discovered in 1991, the site holds bones from at least 24 people, including children, and their personal belongings, such as necklace beads, stone tools, and tembetás or lip ornaments. Previously calculated radiocarbon dates suggest they lived there about 1,500 years ago.

One grave also holds the partial skeleton of a fox, which the study identifies for the first time as a Dusicyon avus — an extinct species closely related to the Falkland Islands fox or wolf (Dusicyon australis) that went extinct in the 19th century.

Related: 1,500-year-old burial of lynx with 4 dogs stacked on it puzzles archaeologists

The fox seems to have been deliberately buried alongside the person in the grave — only the second such find in South America, University of Oxford zooarchaeologist Ophélie Lebrasseur told Live Science.