Science: Animals sought closeness with humans 30,000 years ago

Sciences Animals have already been looking for proximity to humans 30,000 years ago

According to a new study, wild animals have been trying to get close to humans for more than 30,000 years. “Food scraps were both a source of food and an attraction for them – and that was even before humans settled,” explains Chris Bowman of the Universities of Helsinki and Tübingen, who co-authored the study and researches prehistoric animal behavior. For example, crows in Czech Moravia were attracted by the remains of mammoths killed by humans. Baumann was able to show similar behavior in foxes in the Swabian Jura 40,000 years ago.

The researcher, together with colleagues and an international team from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoecology, describes Paleolithic relationships between humans and ravens in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. The results therefore strongly suggest that scavengers benefited from the hunting behavior of humans and that humans used the bones and feathers of animals.

People bring food

Many mammoth carcasses have been found at the archaeological site in the Czech Republic – but also an above-average number of crow bones for this period. “If we find bird bones, they’re crow bones,” Bowman said. The analysis showed that the birds had eaten the remains of the mammoths. “People were like ‘chief predators’ of birds, who kept bringing food.”

Today, similar behavior can be observed in cities – one speaks in monotheism -. The paleoecologist explained that pigeons, foxes and other wild animals settled there because they could subsist on what people left behind. Essentially, the current study shows that animals were already doing this before humans settled down 10,000 years ago.

The area of ​​archaic human behavior research that Baumann and colleagues are working on is relatively new, he said. The researcher added that the results will be possible through new analysis options in the laboratory. So far, there are mainly findings on animals as hunting prey. Not much is known about the advantages some animals had in proximity to humans during the Paleolithic period. Therefore, more comprehensive studies on the evolution of human-animal relationships are important in order to better understand the early ecosystems of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, according to the researchers.

dpa