Ferocious Birds Pets Early Man Turns Out to Be in Indonesia!


 Early humans also kept birds like modern humans. The difference is, what they keep is a ferocious cassowary bird. Cassowaries have legs whose claws are sharp like daggers, capable of kicking very strongly. One kick from this bird can remove the contents of the human stomach so hard.

But surprisingly, this very unique bird may be the 'chicken' or the 'bird' of humans. In other words, these cassowaries are used as livestock but also to be kept. The remains of eggshells 18,000 years ago provide clues to this.


"This is not a small fowl, this is a large, rugged, flightless bird that can eviscerate your bowels," anthropologist Kristina Douglass explained to Science Alert Thursday (30/9/2021).



This hefty fruit-eater is an animal commonly found in Papua, in Eastern Indonesia and in the rainforests of Australia and Papua New Guinea.


Researchers from this study studied how humans from the late Pleistocene to the early Holocene managed their resources in Papua New Guinea's montane rainforest (PNG). They found that people there harvested far more cassowary eggs than adult birds. The eggs are likely those of the pygmy cassowary, which weighs 20 kg as an adult.



Douglass and colleagues built a model of eggshell development using a 3D microscope of ostrich eggs, to identify key characteristics over time. After successful tests with other bird species, they were then able to apply this model to more than 1,000 cassowary eggshell fragments from the PNG National Museum and Art Gallery, collected by New Zealand archaeologist Susan Bulmer.


"Most of the eggshells are harvested in the late stages," Douglass said. Thus, this concludes that early humans deliberately harvested eggs at the embryonic stage having fully formed limbs, beaks, claws and feathers.


"They seem to eat balut or hatch chicks," he continued.


Balut is a common snack in the Philippines in the form of chick embryos that are cooked and eaten from the shell.


Evidence of them hatching cassowaries is evidenced by the large number of late-stage eggshell samples that do not show burning. Thus, the researchers can say these animals hatched and early humans did not eat them.


This behavior we see occurred thousands of years before the domestication of chickens. Chickens were domesticated about 9,500 years ago, according to genetic evidence. So while it's highly unlikely today to keep cassowaries -- except in zoos -- this is the earliest known example of humans raising birds.

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