MAN’S best friend could easily have been a fox. It turns out they are readily tamed, and just as good as their canine cousins at understanding cues from people. The finding casts doubt on how humans domesticated dogs around 12,000 years ago.
An international team led by Brian Hare of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, studied two fox colonies kept at a fur farm in Siberia. Since 1959, one colony had been bred for tameness and the other not.
The tamed foxes were just as skilful as puppies at obeying signals to find hidden…
