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This is scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Jason Goldman.

Foxes hunt small animals, and when other predators, including us, kill large animals, foxes are known to scavenge on the leftovers.

Now a study of their scavenging shows that foxes have slyly relied on people for food for tens of thousands of years.

I saw that foxes benefit a lot today from humans and I was wondering if this is also the case in the past.

Chris Bauman from the University of Tumingen Institute for Scientific Archaeology.

Humans may have had a hand in driving the extinction of large herbivores, like

mammoths and mastodons in the late Pleistocene, which ended around 12,000 years ago. But we inadvertently helped other species, and Bauman suspects that

Pleistocene-era foxes may have been among them. So Bauman and his team obtained the remains of 70 foxes found in southwestern Germany.

They ranged from around 42,000 years ago when Neanderthals lived in the area

to some 30,000 years ago when Homo sapiens came to dominate the region.

In the study we analysed the bone collection of the foxes and saw that there are indeed

these different strategies of feeding.

The carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the fox bones

supplied clues to what the foxes had eaten.

And at the earlier Neanderthal era sites, a few of the fox's hunted rodents,

but most had a diet indistinguishable from the larger carnivores,

meaning that they regularly scavenged from the kills made by wolves and bears.

But by the late Pleistocene, when we showed up, the foxes had switched to a diet of mainly

reindeer and horse meat, that is human table scraps. The finding is in the journal

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