Neanderthals hunted golden eagles 130,000 years ago and may have prized their talons and feathers
- Researchers examined how frequently they found bird remains at ancient sites
- Marked talons and wing bones from many types of birds were found in caves
- Small notches were seen on them suggesting they were strung on a necklace
- The team noticed that cut-marked talons and bones were especially common from golden eagles, with nine such finds reported from Neanderthal caves
Golden eagle talons may have been of symbolic value to Neanderthals who lived 130,000 years ago, according to a new study.
Researchers found that the prehistoric hominins were hunting eagles for their talons and feathers rather than for their meat, like they did other birds, such as crows.
Eagle bones and talons have been found across dozens of sites in central and western Europe occupied by both Neanderthals and humans.
They looked at how frequently eagle bones were found in prehistoric human sites to see if they were more prevalent among neanderthal societies.
The team not only found golden eagle remains at 26 sites, but that they had cut marks along the wing bones suggesting that the feathers were carefully extracted.
The findings suggest that the bones were used to adorn necklaces, lending more credence to evidence that Neanderthals led much more sophisticated lives than originally thought.
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Golden eagle talons may have had a symbolic value to Neanderthals, according to a new study. Researchers found that our prehistoric cousins were hunting eagles for their talons and feathers rather than for their meat like they did with other birds
Before the neanderthals went extinct, they overlapped with humans who came from Europe around forty thousand years ago.
It was assumed that neanderthals went extinct because humans were smarter but according to new research by The Gibraltar National Museum, this wasn’t the case.
According to the New Scientist, three talons from a white-tailed eagle were found in a Neanderthal site in Croatia, which have small matching notches suggesting they were strung on a necklace.
‘If you’re doing things with feathers and claws, it’s going beyond purely functional and there’s something symbolic there,’ said Clive Finlayson at The Gibraltar National Museum.
The team looked at how frequently they found different bird remains found in prehistoric human sites. The findings add to growing evidence that Neanderthals led much more sophisticated lives than originally thought
To see if this was just because golden eagles were more common at the time, they compared this figure with numbers of unmarked bones found in caves, for golden eagles, as well as other birds.
For most bird species, the number of cut-marked remains correlated with the number of bones found.
The team said that golden eagle talons stood out as being ‘more likely’ to show marks from human intervention indicating that they were preferred.
‘Everywhere there are historic examples of people using eagles, they were treated as a symbolic species,’ David Frayer of the University of Kansas told the New Scientist.
‘Neanderthals weren’t treating eagles as meat, like they did crows but they were choosing them for talons and feathers.
I think that’s a strong piece of evidence that Neanderthals had the same kinds of feelings about eagles as more recent people.’
WHO WERE THE NEANDERTHALS?
The Neanderthals were a close human ancestor that mysteriously died out around 50,000 years ago.
The species lived in Africa with early humans for hundreds of millennia before moving across to Europe around 500,000 years ago.
They were later joined by humans taking the same journey some time in the past 100,000 years.
The Neanderthals were a cousin species of humans but not a direct ancestor – the two species split from a common ancestor – that perished around 50,000 years ago. Pictured is a Neanderthal museum exhibit
These were the original ‘cavemen’, historically thought to be dim-witted and brutish compared to modern humans.
In recent years though, and especially over the last decade, it has become increasingly apparent we’ve been selling Neanderthals short.
A growing body of evidence points to a more sophisticated and multi-talented kind of ‘caveman’ than anyone thought possible.
It now seems likely that Neanderthals buried their dead with the concept of an afterlife in mind.
Additionally, their diets and behaviour were surprisingly flexible.
They used body art such as pigments and beads, and they were the very first artists, with Neanderthal cave art (and symbolism) in Spain apparently predating the earliest modern human art by some 20,000 years.
