Eight, mostly complete talons of the white-tailed eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) from the Krapina Neanderthal site in present-day Croatia may be part of a jewelry assemblage, says a team of scientists led by Dr David Frayer of the University of Kansas.



“It’s really a stunning discovery,” said Dr Frayer, who is the senior author of the paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

“It’s one of those things that just appeared out of the blue. It’s so unexpected and it’s so startling because there’s just nothing like it until very recent times to find this kind of jewelry.”

These white-tailed eagle bones all derive from a single time period at the Krapina site.

Four talons bear multiple edge-smoothed cut marks, and eight show polishing facets or abrasion.

Three of the largest talons have small notches at roughly the same place along the plantar surface.

Dr Frayer and his colleagues from the Croatian Natural History Museum and the Institute for Quaternary Paleontology and Geology, both in Zagreb, Croatia, suggest these features may be part of a jewelry assemblage, like mounting the talons in a necklace (or bracelet).

Some have argued that Neanderthals lacked symbolic ability or copied this behavior from modern humans, but the presence of the talons indicates that the Krapina Neanderthals may have acquired eagle talons for some kind of symbolic purpose.

“As in ethnohistoric-present societies, the Neanderthals’ practice of catching eagles very likely involved planning and ceremony,” the scientists wrote in the paper.

“We cannot know the way they were captured, but if collected from carcasses it must have taken keen eyes to locate the dead birds as rare as they were in the prehistoric avifauna.”

“We suspect that the collection of talons from at least three different white-tailed eagles mitigates against recovering carcasses in the field, but more likely represents evidence for live capture.”

“In any case, these talons provide multiple new lines of evidence for Neanderthals’ abilities and cultural sophistication.”

These talons, according to the archaeologists, are the earliest evidence for jewelry in the European fossil record.

They demonstrate that the Krapina Neanderthals may have made jewelry 130,000 years ago – about 80,000 years before the appearance of anatomically modern humans in Europe.

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Radovčić D et al. 2015. Evidence for Neandertal Jewelry: Modified White-Tailed Eagle Claws at Krapina. PLoS ONE 10 (3): e0119802; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0119802