EXETER, ENGLAND—According to a statement released by the University of Exeter, Alexander Pryor and his colleagues analyzed the 27,500-year-old teeth of 29 butchered Arctic foxes unearthed at Kraków Spadizista, an Upper Paleolithic site in southern Poland. The chemical composition and structures of the teeth and their roots allowed the scientists to determine how old each animal was at the time of death, where it was born, and what time of year it had died. The study revealed that at least four of the foxes had migrated long distances, and at least ten of them had been killed between late winter and late spring. Pryor explained that Ice Age hunters likely timed their fox hunts to take advantage of the animals’ thick fur coats and body fat in late winter, and used Kraków Spadizista as a temporary base camp while maintaining trapping lines and processing hides during the hunting season. To read about a structure in Russia that hunter-gatherers constructed out of mammoth bones some 25,000 years ago, go to “Ice Age Ice Box.”
Ice Age Fox Hunters Braved Europe’s Winter Cold
News September 8, 2020
Recommended Articles
Top 10 Discoveries of 2020 January/February 2021
Largest Viking DNA Study
Northern Europe and Greenland
Digs & Discoveries November/December 2020
Honoring the Dead
Digs & Discoveries November/December 2020
Piggy Playthings
Artifacts May/June 2020
Torah Shield and Pointer
-
Features July/August 2020
A Silk Road Renaissance
Excavations in Tajikistan have unveiled a city of merchant princes that flourished from the fifth to the eighth century A.D.
(Prisma Archivo/Alamy Stock Photo) -
Features July/August 2020
Idol of the Painted Temple
On Peru’s central coast, an ornately carved totem was venerated across centuries of upheaval and conquest
(© Peter Eeckhout) -
Letter from Normandy July/August 2020
The Legacy of the Longest Day
More than 75 years after D-Day, the Allied invasion’s impact on the French landscape is still not fully understood
(National Archives) -
Artifacts July/August 2020
Roman Canteen
(Valois, INRAP)