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When you think of people raising birds, you might think of harmless chickens and probably not an animal that could kill you in an instant.
But apparently a ferocious bird known as the cassowary was one of the first animals raised by humans around 18,000 years ago, according to new research.
Appearing large and colorful, the flightless cassowary is native to northern Australia and New Guinea. It’s the second heaviest bird in the world behind the ostrich, according to the San Diego Zoo, and it has a helmet, or helmet, on top of its head.
As glorious as it is, the San Diego Zoo considers it the most dangerous bird in the world due to a 4-inch dagger-shaped claw on each foot that “can open up any predator or potential threat. with one quick kick “.
But thousands of years ago, humans didn’t care about the dangers these birds posed and raised them to adulthood, possibly making the cassowary the first bird managed by humans, study finds. published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.
“This behavior that we are seeing occurs thousands of years before chicken domestication,” Kristina Douglass, assistant professor of anthropology and African studies at Penn State and lead author of the study, said in a statement. “And it’s not a small fowl, it’s a huge, mean, flightless bird that can gut you. Most likely the dwarf variety that weighs 20 kilograms (44 pounds).”
The study says cassowaries look more like velociraptors than chickens, but they do have one trait that has been allowed to be raised by humans: the footprint, which means the bird assumes the first thing that he sees when he hatches is his mother and will follow him everywhere.
But that wasn’t the only thing humans did with these birds and their eggs; they ate them too.
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Douglass and his team examined more than 1,000 fragments of cassowary eggshells between 6,000 and 18,000 years old using 3D laser microscopes. The results showed that some harvested eggs were broken prematurely, meaning people ate developing egg embryos, a practice also known as balut in Southeast Asia. However, evidence suggests that some of these eggs were also taken to be harvested and ultimately reared by humans.
“We also considered burning the eggshells,” said Douglass. “There are enough samples of late-stage eggshells that don’t show burns that we can tell they’re hatching and not eating them.”
However, the study leaves questions about how humans obtained these eggs, as cassowaries lay their eggs in random locations where they are aggressively guarded by the male bird. Yet the possible domestication occurs years before the chicken was domesticated by humans, which is estimated to be less than 9500 years ago.
Follow Jordan Mendoza on Twitter: @ jordan_mendoza5.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The cassowary, the world’s most dangerous bird, was raised by humans
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