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The one who invented the old riddle “Who came first: the chicken or the egg?” »Failed to consider the most dangerous bird in the world (and the largest in Australia) – the cassowary (Casuary).
New research suggests relationship between humans and cassowaries dates back to late Pleistocene era – several thousand years before humans domesticated chickens and geese. “And it’s not a little fowl,” lead study author Kristina Douglass, archaeologist at Penn State, said in a press release. “It’s a huge, nasty, flightless bird that can gut you – most likely, the dwarf variety that weighs 20 kilograms (44 pounds).” By examining the remains of ancient cassowary egg shells, Douglass and an international team of researchers determined that about 18,000 years ago, the people of New Guinea collected, hatched – and eventually raised – Cassowary chicks, which researchers see as a sophisticated food-gathering technique. This is the first known evidence of intentional breeding of birds.
Using a combination of 3D imaging, computer modeling and egg morphology, scientists examined more than 1,000 cassowary egg shell fragments dating from between 6,000 and 18,000 years ago. “We used this approach to see whether or not there was a pattern in terms of when people harvest cassowary eggs,” Douglass told Live Science. “And we found out that there was a pattern and people harvested the eggs preferably in the later stages of development.”
According to Douglass, people would have kept these eggs for one of two purposes: to eat them or to raise the hatched chicks for their meat and feathers. Today, late-stage fertilized eggs are a popular street food in several countries in East Asia and the South Pacific, including the Philippines, according to a 2019 article published in the Ethnic Food Journal. Known as balut, the dish is typically made from duck roe today. But Douglass and his team suggest that the people of New Guinea may have eaten cassowary balut thousands of years ago.
Or, maybe they raised cassowary chicks. Like geese, cassowary chicks print on the first creature they see, according to the University of Michigan Animal Diversity Web. This makes them oddly ideal for human breeding, a practice that continues in parts of New Guinea to this day, University of Maine anthropologist Paul Roscoe told Live Science. While Douglass and his team haven’t found any evidence of ancient people writing cassowaries, it’s something they plan to look for in the future.
Cassowaries and their eggs are valuable resources for New Guineans. Historically, the cassowary tibiotarsae, the upper part of the bird’s leg, was used to make bone daggers for hunting, according to research published in the Royal Society Open Science. Today, their feathers are prized for ornamentation, and birds remain an important source of meat. “Cassowary is a delicacy,” said Roscoe.
But these striking birds, which can grow to nearly 1.8 meters tall and 54 kg (120 pounds), are also incredibly dangerous. “They have these really big, 4 inches long [10 cm] claws. And if they feel threatened, they will use them, ”said Douglass. A frightened or territorial cassowary can kick hard enough to gut a medium-sized (or even human-sized) mammal, vertebrate paleontologist Darren Naish written for Scientific American. Cassowaries sometimes kill humans, including a man in Florida who was fatally attacked by a cassowary he was keeping on his farm in 2019, The Florida Times-Union reported. Even so, these cases are extremely rare.
In addition to being anthropologically important, the breeding of the ancient cassowary helps dispel some pervasive scientific myths. To this day, many people generally assume that the cultural practices of hunter-gatherers are somehow less sophisticated than those of agricultural societies, Douglass said. But his team’s research contradicts this outdated hypothesis.
“People had this very sophisticated knowledge that they passed on from generation to generation,” she said, and this type of research reaffirms “the importance of local and indigenous knowledge”.
The research is detailed in the October issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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