Neanderthals may have hunted golden eagles to make ornaments

Golden eagle talons may have been of symbolic value to Neanderthals who lived 130,000 years ago, according to a new study.

Credit: Stewart Finlayson

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.

Claws of a white-tailed eagle from which a necklace of Neanderthal
 origin had been formed [Credit: Luka Mjeda]

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 researchers in the Quaternary Science Review, 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.

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.

The cuts and notches on the White-Tailed Eagle claws suggest that they were strung on sinews
like a bracelet or necklace [Credit: Radovcic et al. 2015]

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.'

Author: Victoria Bell | Source: Daily Mail [April 29, 2019]