PARIS: They have been our meat and our messengers, a source of fertilizer and a religious symbol: while pigeons are now vilified as dirty city pests, they have long played an important role in human society.
Now, research published on Thursday has revealed that these humble birds were first domesticated 3,500 years ago, meaning they have been involved in our lives for almost a millennium longer than previously thought.
“The forgetting of pigeons by humans occurred relatively recently in human history,” said Anderson Carter, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. AFP.
Pigeons were still a useful part of society in the 19th and 20th centuries, explained the lead author of a new study in the journal Antiquity.
“They were still used to transmit messages and even played an important role in wars in particular,” he added.
“But then many technological advances happened, the telegraph was invented, then the telephone, and pigeons were left without a job.”
However, because we had spent thousands of years conditioning them to live alongside us, the birds stayed close.
It was only when large cities emerged after the industrial revolution that “there was a growing view that they were pests, dirty and disease-spreaders,” Carter said.
Now, “anti-pigeon architecture, like spikes on the top of buildings,” is common, he added.
free bird
The common pigeon, or rock pigeon, originally comes from the Mediterranean region. Genomic analysis has shown that today’s city dwellers are closely related to the feral pigeons of the Middle East.
For the new research, a Dutch-led team of scientists went to the archaeological site of Hala Sultan Tekke on the shores of the Larnaca salt lake in southeastern Cyprus.
They analyzed 159 ancient pigeon bones to find out how they lived and died, and looked for signs of human intervention, such as cuts.
Biometric and isotopic analyzes revealed that pigeons lived in the 13th and 14th centuries BC, during the Bronze Age.
By extracting collagen from bones, scientists were able to determine the ratios of nitrogen and carbon, which are closely related to an animal’s diet.
The results were then compared to animals and humans found in Cyprus dating from the same period.
“The Hala Sultan Tekke pigeons overlapped quite significantly with results from humans from other Bronze Age Cypriot sites, showing that they probably ate a diet very similar to that of humans,” Carter said.
“This most likely means that they were domesticated or on the way to being domesticated” around 1,400 BC. C., the study’s lead author, Canan Cakirlar, of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Marine Research, said in a statement.
This is almost a thousand years earlier than previous research has found, including giant stone structures used as nesting houses for pigeons discovered in Greece dating back to around 300 BC.
One goal of the research is to “change the way we interact and think about this bird,” Carter said.
“And begin to realize that their story is also ours.”
