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People ate lots of foxes and wildcats 10,000 years ago

Foxes and cats weren’t just caught for their pelts, hint cut marks and burns on bones found at a site in Israel

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

1 January 2025

An African wild cat (Felis silvestris lybica) in the Kalahari desert, South Africa

African wildcats seem to have been part of the human diet in the Levant 10,000 years ago

NSP-RF/Alamy

About 10,000 years ago, foxes and wildcats made up a notable part of people’s diets in what is now Western Galilee in Israel.

Archaeologists have long attributed the abundance of small carnivore bones in early Levant settlements to people harvesting fur and to symbolic associations like tooth ornaments.

But now, Shirad Galmor, while at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and her colleagues have found…

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