Thursday, February 24, 2011

Neanderthals and ornaments, birds of a feather?

M. Peresani and colleagues (2011) report on the discovery of cut-marked bird bones from the latest Mousterian levels at Grotta di Fumane, located in the Veneto region of NE Italy. They interpret the fact that these cutmarks are almost exclusively found ResearchBlogging.orgon wing bones of only a subset of the 22 species of birds found at Fumane as evidence that Neanderthals there specifically targeted wings and feathers to be used in the manufacture of ornaments (check out Cutrona's fantastic picture of what they may have looked like just above).

Alert readers will remember that I've talked about Fumane before on this blog, mainly in reference to its early Aurignacian art and its transitional industry that's been likened to the Uluzzian. This new finding makes Fumane even more remarkable by providing strong evidence for Neanderthal use of personal ornamentation. Equally important, in my view, is that Neanderthals were somehow able to procure birds, a topic I'll return to below.

But first, let's talk ornamentation. The authors claim that a decorative use of the feathers targeted by Neanderthals is the most likely interpretation. Specifically, they rule out the use of these feathers in fletching since Neanderthal spears would not have benefited from it. Likewise, they rule out an alimentary interpretation since the cut mark are found almost only on wing bones, which yield relatively little meat. They also emphasize that some of the birds whose feathers were sought were raptors which are rarely consumed by humans. They therefore rule out the two main alternative interpretations of their findings.

To sum up, Neanderthals clearly were collecting feathers, specifically remiges, the long and sturdy flight feathers of four main types of birds, including bearded lammergeiers, red-footed falcons, common wood pigeons, and Alpine choughs. A cutmarked bone of the European black vulture was also found in a lower Mousterian level (A9) at the site. What is interesting here is that the collected feathers create a visual palette of colors that include gray, blue-gray, orange-slate gray, and black. These are visually striking but certainly more subdued colors than the reds and orange recently identified in ochres used by slightly older (ca. 50kya) Neanderthals in southern Spain (Zilhao et al. 2010), which I discussed in an earlier post and that would have been complemented by the hues of seashells. The reason why the Fumane color scheme is interesting is that it is very different from that identified for southern space. From there, it is only one step to start thinking that maybe these color preferences had some kind of cultural meaning, especially considering the much wider range of birds available around Fumane than the five species from which remiges were collected.

To expand on that idea a bit, the use of feathers as parts of ornaments at Fumane also indicate that the behavior of decorating one's body among Neanderthals was fairly flexible. Up to now, we only had evidence of coloring minerals like the ochre I just mentioned but also including manganese in SW France and of shells being used as bodily decorations. By adding feathers to the roster of items used by Neanderthals to adorn themselves, the Fumane evidence suggests that Neanderthals were able to use a fairly broad range of materials to embody and visually broadcast some dimension(s) of their identity. The fact that you see some regional variability in what material were used in what region also suggest that maybe these choices reflect social conventions bound by the resources available in specific region, maybe even in a way that anticipates similar decisions about what kinds of materials to manufacture beads from during the Aurignacian (Vanhaeren and d'Errico 2006). Admittedly, this is speculative, but the ever widening array of materials used by Neanderthals to decorate themselves certainly suggests that this was a well ingrained behavior that was filtered by locally available resources. In this, it severely undermines the credibility of the idea that Neanderthals were only able to pick up the idea of personal ornamentation from modern humans during the Transition Interval, a point Peresani et al. (2011) themselves emphasize in their conclusions.

Another thought-provoking question raised by the ca. 660 bird bones recovered from these Mousterian deposits is just how Neanderthals caught them. By all appearances, most of their hunting technology would have been, quite literally, overkill for hunting birds. Heavy spears could have also damaged the feathers that were the ultimate goal of the Neanderthals. The authors suggest that maybe they collected dead birds, though the amount of processing manifest on the bones suggests to me that this is unlikely, as all of these birds would have had to be extremely fresh if they had been scavenged, which seems a bit unrealistic. So this opens the possibility that Neanderthals were actively procuring birds, though exactly how is still very much an open question. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's likely that Neanderthals had some form of cordage, and that maybe they were able to fashion nets out of it.

Now, why does it matter if Neanderthals directly procured birds? It matters a great deal in the context of recently proposed views that state that Neanderthals lacked sexual division of labor (Kuhn and Stiner 2006). In large part, that view is based on the apparent lack in Neanderthal sites of plants and fast-moving small game that could reflect the labor of one segment of the population as opposed to the large game hunting practice by the other, presumably male segment. Well, if Neanderthals procured birds, that provides some fairly clear evidence of small game hunting, and when you consider the recent direct evidence for Neanderthals having consumed (and cooked!) a diverse array of plants (Henry et al. 2010), you've got some data that could be used to challenge the view of Neanderthals as lacking sexual division of labor.

And to think, all of this from some cutting, scraping and snapping marks on bird bones!


Henry, A., Brooks, A., & Piperno, D. (2010). Microfossils in calculus demonstrate consumption of plants and cooked foods in Neanderthal diets (Shanidar III, Iraq; Spy I and II, Belgium) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (2), 486-491 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016868108

Kuhn, S., & Stiner, M. (2006). What’s a Mother to Do? The Division of Labor among Neandertals and Modern Humans in Eurasia Current Anthropology, 47 (6), 953-981 DOI: 10.1086/507197

Peresani, M., Fiore, I., Gala, M., Romandini, M., & Tagliacozzo, A. (2011). Late Neandertals and the intentional removal of feathers as evidenced from bird bone taphonomy at Fumane Cave 44 ky B.P., Italy Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016212108

VANHAEREN, M., & DERRICO, F. (2006). Aurignacian ethno-linguistic geography of Europe revealed by personal ornaments Journal of Archaeological Science, 33 (8), 1105-1128 DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2005.11.017



Maju said...

Thanks for the entry. As I said in the other post I was intrigued about the exact stratigraphic/chronological frame/context of the finding because the news articles I could read were quite confusing. You already clarified that in the other conversation.

In any case it seems like this Fumane Cave would be a key site to understand the so-called MP-UP transition in Europe: it has everything: Neanderthals with Mousterian, with feathers, with proto-Uluzzian, then also Protoaurignacian and then Aurignacian with one of the earliest examples of rock art...

Andrew Oh-Willeke said...

Falcons are fairly trainable with food. Perhaps they were lured with food from big kills and then killed at that point. Wood pidgeons also seem like likely candidates for easy to kill birds.

Julien Riel-Salvatore said...

Maju -
my pleasure. And yes, you're absolutely right, Fumane is a key site to our understanding not only of the M/UP transition, but also of internal dynamics and human behavior during both the Middle and early Upper Paleolithic.

Julien Riel-Salvatore said...

Andrew - thanks for your comment, you make an interesting point about falcons. Neanderthals were no doubt highly aware of the behaviors of the animals in their environment, so it's certainly a possibility. Don't know about the wood pigeons, though. Problem is, this wouldn't really leave any traces for us to identify archaeologically today. Maybe a demographic profile of the population of birds they captured could give us some insights, like has been done to elucidate small game hunting behavior in other areas.


terryt said...

I remember reading, when I was young, a story about Native Americans hiding in a hole covered with sticks. They placed a dead animal on top of the sticks and when a raptor alighted they ngrabbed it by the legs and knocked it on the head. Perhaps unbelievable but I know a woman who got so angry with a harrier hawk killing her little ducks that she did much the same thing. The hawk didn't think to bite when it was caught. It was more interesting in trying to escape. So she killed it by banging it against a post.

I can't see how any similar system would work for wood pigeons though. But the New Zealand Maori people used to put nooses in water troughs they put in berry trees to catch the local pigeons though. Perhap Neanderthals used something similar?

"I'd say it's likely that Neanderthals had some form of cordage, and that maybe they were able to fashion nets out of it".

To make nooses anyway.

Maju said...

Honestly, I think that nets are a zillion times more effective with birds - alternatively lasso-traps and jail-traps. I would not grab a raptor by the legs myself preferably.

What about stone-throwing with a sling anyhow? Though that I guess would leave a hurling mark on Neanderthal shoulders, what is not documented, I believe.

terryt said...

"I would not grab a raptor by the legs myself preferably".

You probably would if it was a required part of the ritual for obtaining the feathers.