FOXES HAVE BEEN EATING OUR LEFTOVERS FOR 42,000 YEARS

While it may feel like a very modern problem to wake up in the morning and find your rubbish bins scavenged by foxes, these sly critters have been dining on human leftovers for tens of thousands of years, researchers at the University of Tübingen, Germany have found. The team compared isotope ratios between the remains of various red and Arctic foxes from several archaeological sites in southwest Germany dating to the Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. They found that from around 42,000 years ago, foxes’ diets began to heavily feature reindeer, which were too big for foxes to hunt but were known to have been important game for humans of the time.