Rock dove: dish of the day for Neanderthals (Image: Kim Taylor/DK/Getty)

Neanderthals had the brains and guile to catch and eat birds, a skill many had assumed was beyond them. Bones found in Gibraltar suggest Neanderthals hunted wild pigeons, possibly by climbing steep cliffs to reach their nests.

“Neanderthals were seen as too brutish to catch fast prey,” says Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum. He and his colleagues studied 1724 bones of rock doves, the wild ancestors of domestic pigeons, from Gorham’s Cave in Gibraltar, a trove of Neanderthal relics.

The rock dove bones were buried in sediments laid down between 28,000 and 67,000 years ago. Most of the excavated layers date from a time when only Neanderthals lived in the area, before the arrival of modern humans around 40,000 years ago. That means only Neanderthals could have caught the rock doves. “They couldn’t have picked up the skills to catch the birds from modern humans,” says Finlayson.


Of the bones examined, 158 had burn marks, 28 had cut marks and 15 had human-like tooth marks. These marked bones were found in 58 per cent of the Neanderthal excavation zones, as well as the only modern human zone. That suggests Neanderthals hunted and ate the doves for thousands of years. Previous finds suggesting that Neanderthals ate birds have been dismissed as one-off events – for instance, a Neanderthal could have found a bird that had just died.

Rock dove fanciers

“This provides the first evidence for sustained and significant use of birds for food by Neanderthals,” says Donald Grayson of the University of Washington in Seattle.

Some anthropologists think Neanderthals died out because they were outcompeted by modern humans. It has been suggested that Neanderthals could only catch big game animals, whereas modern humans were smart enough to catch a wide range of prey, including fish and birds.

But Finlayson’s findings, along with earlier evidence that Neanderthals ate seals and dolphins, suggest the Neanderthals were equally capable. “The more we can show similarities between our ancestors and Neanderthals, the more the barriers between us are broken down,” he says.

“The sustained use of pigeons provides even more evidence that Neanderthal hunting and foraging abilities were on a par with those of modern humans,” says Grayson.

To catch a pigeon

Nobody knows how Neanderthals caught the rock doves, which nest and roost on high cliff ledges. “We know that they climbed up cliffs to hunt ibex, so maybe they also climbed to the ledges where the birds nested,” says Finlayson. “I think they might have had snares or netting made from grasses, but we’ll never know as it’s all perishable.”

Finlayson is now looking for evidence that the Neanderthals caught some birds, especially birds of prey, to obtain feathers as ornaments. That would be in line with a 2011 study which hinted that Neanderthals used decorative feathers.

His team is analysing the bones of hundreds of other bird species from Gorham’s Cave. They have already found cut marks on the wing bones of eagles and vultures, suggesting their large, black feathers had been carefully removed. “Neanderthals may have started with eating [the birds], then moved to other purposes such as clothing or ornamentation,” says Finlayson.

Journal reference: Scientific Reports, DOI: 10.1038/srep05971