The earliest pigeon fanciers
Blasco, Ruth (El Museo de Gibraltar)
Finlayson, Clive (El Museo de Gibraltar)
Rosell Ardèvol, Jordi (Universitat Rovira i Virgili. Àrea de Prehistòria)
Sánchez Marco, Antonio (Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont)
Finlayson, Stewart (El Museo de Gibraltar)
Finlayson, Geraldine (El Museo de Gibraltar)
Negro, Juan José (Estación Biológica de Doñana)
Giles Pacheco, Francisco (Gibraltar Caves Project)
Rodríguez Vidal, Joaquín (Universidad de Huelva. Departamento de Ciencias de la Tierra)

Data:	2014
Resum:	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.
Ajuts:	Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación CGL2012-38434-C03-03 Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación CGL2012-38358 Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación CGL2012-34717
Nota:	Altres ajuts: R. Blasco is a Beatriu de Pinós post-doctoral research fellowship recipient (Generalitat de Catalunya and COFUND Marie Curie Actions, EU-FP7)
Drets:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, i la comunicació pública de l'obra, sempre que no sigui amb finalitats comercials, i sempre que es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. No es permet la creació d'obres derivades.
Llengua:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Publicat a:	Scientific reports, Vol. 4 (2014), art. 5971, ISSN 2045-2322

DOI: 10.1038/srep05971
PMID: 25101932

7 p, 1.1 MB

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