RT Journal Article
T1 The earliest pigeon fanciers
A1 Blasco, Ruth
A1 Finlayson, Clive
A1 Rosell, Jordi
A1 Sánchez Marco, Antonio
A1 Finlayson, Stewart
A1 Finlayson, Geraldine
A1 Negro, Juan José
A1 Giles Pacheco, Francisco
A1 Rodríguez Vidal, Joaquín
AB Feral Pigeons have colonised all corners of the Earth, having developed a close association with humans andtheir activities. The wild ancestor of the Feral Pigeon, the Rock Dove, is a species of rocky habitats, nestingtypically on cliff ledges and at the entrance to large caves. This habit would have brought them into close contactwith cave-dwelling humans, a relationship usually linked to the development of dwellings in the Neolithic. Weshow that the association between humans and RockDoves is an ancient one with its roots in the Palaeolithicand predates the arrival of modern humans into Europe. At Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar, the Neanderthalsexploited Rock Doves for food for a period of over 40 thousand years, the earliest evidence dating to at least 67thousand years ago.We show that the exploitation was not casual or sporadic, having found repeated evidenceof the practice in different, widely spaced, temporal contexts within the cave. Our results point to hithertounappreciated capacities of the Neanderthals to exploit birds as food resources on a regular basis.More so, theywere practising it long before the arrival of modern humans and had therefore invented it independently.
PB Nature Publishing Group
SN 2045-2322
YR 2014
FD 2014-08
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10272/8769
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10272/8769
LA eng
NO Blasco, R., Finlayson, C., Rosell, J., Sánchez Marco, A., Finlayson, S., Finlayson, G., Negro, J.J., Giles Pacheco, F., Rodríguez Vidal, J.: "The earliest pigeon fanciers". Scientific Reports. 4 : Article number 5971 (2014). ISSN 2045-2322
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Huelva
RD 30 may 2026