{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02139261744966443, 'fraction_numerical': 0.006711409395973154, 'mean_word_length': 4.774818401937046, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Island Fox Paradox

On a sunny August morning, he and his colleagues probe with their trowels, preparing to uncover the skeleton of a ritually buried dog. Carefully arranged remains of dogs and foxes have been found clustered at the site, surrounded by hearths and valuable pieces of tool stone. It’s clear that the prehistoric people of San Nicolas revered the island fox, and that both dogs and foxes played an important role in their lives. The native people of the Channel Islands—the Chumash of the north, and the Tongva of the south—were forced out of their homes and relocated to mainland missions in the 1830s. Their fox-venerating practices soon died out, and little is known about those practices today. In their heyday, the Chumash performed a fox dance, wearing headdresses made of fox pelts. On Santa Cruz, at the northern, Chumash end of the island chain, early archaeologists found a child buried with two fox skulls; another burial site on the same island contained a man and a woman with a fox skull laid between them. A site on San Clemente Island—like San Nicolas, this was Tongva turf—contained six ritually buried foxes and six dogs. As a graduate student in the early 1990s, Vellanoweth worked on an excavation at Viscaino Point on San Nicolas. Mixed with a hodgepodge of human artifacts, he found a 5000-year-old animals, and it will lean forward, coming almost close enough to touch. It’s forbidden to feed these foxes, members of a threatened species unique to the Channel Islands off the southern California coast. But archaeologists say these beasts evolved among native people; the island fox may belong right here, at the edge of a communal feast. In the 1990s, a complex chain of events triggered by human actions brought foxes in the northern Channel Islands to the brink of extinction. The animals became the focus of intense and controversial conservation efforts. Now, archaeologists have new evidence that suggests foxes were carried to the islands by indigenous people thousands of years ago, and that humans shaped the evolution of the entire species. Entrenched conservation dogma assumes that we should strive to restore American ecosystems to the “pristine” state encountered by the first European settlers. The case of the island fox raises questions about just how we should go about protecting species whose history is entwined with our own.