'Their story is our story': Pigeons and humans, 3,500 years together

PARIS: They have been our meat and our messengers, a source of fertiliser and a religious symbol: while pigeons are now mostly reviled as dirty city pests, they long played an important role in human society.

Now, research published on Thursday has revealed that the humble birds were first domesticated 3,500 years ago, meaning they have been enmeshed in our lives for nearly a millennium longer than previously thought.

“Humans forgetting about pigeons happened relatively recently in human history,” Anderson Carter, a bio-archaeologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, told AFP.

Pigeons were still a useful part of society as recently as the 19th and 20th centuries, explained the lead author of a new study in the journal Antiquity.

“They were still being used to carry messages and even had an important role in wars in particular,” she added.

“But then a lot of technological advancements happened, the telegraph was invented and then the telephone, and pigeons were out of a job”.

However, because we had spent thousands of years conditioning them to live alongside us, the birds stayed nearby.

It was only when huge cities emerged after the industrial revolution that “there was a rising view that they were pests, dirty and spreading diseases,” Carter said.

Now, “anti-pigeon architecture such as spikes on top of buildings” are a common sight, she added.

Free bird

The common pigeon — or rock dove — originally came from the Mediterranean region. Genomic analysis has shown that today’s city-dwellers are closely related to wild doves from the Middle East.

For the new research, a Dutch-led team of scientists went to the Hala Sultan Tekke archaeological site on the shores of the Larnaca salt lake in southeast Cyprus.

They analysed 159 ancient pigeon bones to find out how they lived and died — and look for signs of human intervention, such as cuts.

Biometric and isotopic analysis revealed that the pigeons lived in the 13th and 14th centuries BC, during the Bronze Age.

By extracting collagen from the bones, the scientists were able to find out their ratios of nitrogen and carbon, which is closely linked to an animal’s diet.

The results were then compared with animals and humans found in Cyprus dating to the same period.

“The Hala Sultan Tekke pigeons overlapped pretty significantly with the results from humans from other Bronze Age Cypriot sites, showing that they likely ate a very similar diet to humans,” Carter said.

“This very likely means that they were domesticated or on their way to being domesticated” at around 1,400 BC, senior study author Canan Cakirlar of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Sea Research said in a statement.

That is nearly a thousand years earlier than previous research has found, including giant stone structures used as pigeon nesting houses discovered in Greece dating from around 300 BC.

One goal of the research is “to change how we interact with and think about this bird,” Carter said.

“And start realising that their story is also our story.”