PARIS: They have been our meat and our messengers, a source of fertilizer and a religious symbol: although pigeons are today generally vilified as filthy urban pests, they have long played an important role in human society.
Now, a study released Thursday has revealed that the humble birds were first domesticated 3,500 years ago, meaning they have been in our lives for almost a millennium longer than previously thought.
“The forgetting of pigeons by humans happened 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 as recently as the 19th and 20th centuries, said the lead author of a new study published in the journal Antiquity.
“They were still used to convey messages and even played an important role in wars in particular,” she added.
“But then a lot of technological advancements took place, the telegraph was invented, then the telephone, and the pigeons found themselves unemployed.”
However, because we had spent thousands of years conditioning them to live alongside us, the birds stayed nearby.
It wasn’t until huge cities emerged after the Industrial Revolution that “they began to be seen as pests and pollutants and spreading diseases,” Carter said.
Today, “pigeon-proof architecture, like spikes on the tops of buildings,” is commonplace, she added.
Free bird
The common pigeon – or rock dove – is native to the Mediterranean region. Genomic analysis has shown that today’s urban dwellers are closely related to wild Middle Eastern doves.
For this new research, a team of scientists led by the Netherlands traveled 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 learn the ratios of nitrogen and carbon, which are closely linked to an animal’s diet.
The results were then compared to those of animals and humans found in Cyprus dating from the same period.
“Hala Sultan Tekke pigeons overlapped quite significantly with results from humans from other Bronze Age Cypriot sites, showing that they probably had a very similar diet to humans,” Carter said.
“This most likely means they were domesticated or about to be domesticated” around 1,400 BC, the study’s lead author, Canan Cakirlar, of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Maritime Research, said in a statement.
That’s nearly a thousand years earlier than previous research has uncovered, including giant stone structures used as pigeon nest boxes discovered in Greece dating to around 300 BC.
One goal of the research is to “change the way we interact with and think about this bird,” Carter said.
“And start to realize that their story is ours too.”
