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. 2014 Aug 7:4:5971.
doi: 10.1038/srep05971.

The earliest pigeon fanciers

Ruth Blasco  1 , Clive Finlayson  1 , Jordi Rosell  2 , Antonio Sánchez Marco  3 , Stewart Finlayson  1 , Geraldine Finlayson  1 , Juan José Negro  4 , Francisco Giles Pacheco  5 , Joaquín Rodríguez Vidal  6
Affiliations

The earliest pigeon fanciers

Ruth Blasco et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

Feral Pigeons have colonised all corners of the Earth, having developed a close association with humans and their activities. The wild ancestor of the Feral Pigeon, the Rock Dove, is a species of rocky habitats, nesting typically on cliff ledges and at the entrance to large caves. This habit would have brought them into close contact with cave-dwelling humans, a relationship usually linked to the development of dwellings in the Neolithic. We show that the association between humans and Rock Doves is an ancient one with its roots in the Palaeolithic and predates the arrival of modern humans into Europe. At Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar, the Neanderthals exploited Rock Doves for food for a period of over 40 thousand years, the earliest evidence dating to at least 67 thousand years ago. We show that the exploitation was not casual or sporadic, having found repeated evidence of the practice in different, widely spaced, temporal contexts within the cave. Our results point to hitherto unappreciated capacities of the Neanderthals to exploit birds as food resources on a regular basis. More so, they were practising it long before the arrival of modern humans and had therefore invented it independently.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(A) Location of Gorham's Cave, Gibraltar, in the southern Iberian Peninsula; (B) Top: General plan of Gorham's Cave showing the location of the excavated sectors [outer sector including the entrance and middle area of the cave, and inner sector (back of the cave)]; Bottom: Geological interpretative section of Gorham's Cave (NW-SE section or B-A projection in top) based on Jiménez-Espejo et al. and previous publications (e.g.9101216); (C) Geological sequence of Gorham's Cave - left: schematic profile of the outer sector (middle area of the cave) modified from Collcut (see Barton et al. for more details); right: stratigraphic profile of the inner sector. Red boxes mark the archaeological levels/units studied here. The photograph in (A) was taken by C. Finlayson and the maps/graphs in (A, B) were made by J.R. and J.R.-V. by using CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 12 and CorelDRAW X3 software. We would like to acknowledge S.N. Collcut and R.N.E. Barton for the permission granted for the use of the geological sequence of Gorham's Cave shown in C-left, courtesy of the School of Archaeology, Oxford.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Cut-marked bones of Rock Dove specimens from Gorham's Cave: sternum (A), ulna (B, E) and humerus (C, D) from level IV, and tibiotarsus from LBSmcf.2 (F).
Note burning damage (Degree 3 -black colour) on tibiotarsus (F).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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