Friday, January 29, 2016

BOULDER, COLORADO—Australia’s first human inhabitants cooked and ate the cantaloupe-sized eggs of Genyornis newtoni, a flightless bird that stood nearly seven feet tall and weighed 500 pounds, according to a new study led by Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado at Boulder. “We consider this the first and only secure evidence that humans were directly preying on now-extinct Australian megafauna. We have documented these characteristically burned Genyornis eggshells at more than 200 sites across the continent,” he said in a press release. The bones of Australia’s extinct megafauna rarely survive in the harsh soil, leaving little chance to find evidence of early hunting activity. The burned eggshell fragments, however, were dated to between 54,000 and 44,000 years ago with optically stimulated luminescence dating, and radiocarbon dated to no younger than 47,000 years old. Analysis of amino acids in the eggshells indicate that the eggs had been cooked at one end with a localized heat source. Many of the burned eggshell fragments were also found in clusters. Miller and his team argue that “the conditions are consistent with early humans harvesting Genyornis eggs, cooking them over fires, and then randomly discarding the eggshell fragments around their cooking fires.” To read more about the relationship between humans and megafauna, go to "Butchering Big Game."