Neandertals Hunted Eagles, Wore Talons as Jewelry

Nature News is reporting that a find of bone adornments was unearthed at the Krapina Neandertal site over 100 years ago but not recognized as being Neandertal in manufacture until just recently. According to the story in Nature News:

Neanderthals hunted mammoths, bison and other powerful animals for food — yet their fiercest foes may have been the massive eagles they snared to make jewellery. The talons of white-tailed eagles found at a Neanderthal site in Croatia show cut marks and patterns of wear that suggest the claws were donned as personal ornaments.

“They’re very powerful birds. It takes a certain amount of bravery and foolishness, even, to catch one of these things,” says David Frayer, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, whose team describes the claws in paper published on 12 March in the journal PLoS ONE.¹ With wing spans of around 2 metres, the birds are Europe’s largest aerial predator.

Here is part of the image from the Nature News story, showing one set of ornaments.

This is more evidence of advanced/metaphysical thought on the part of Neandertals (not to mention their hunting abilities) and helps to paint a better picture of a complex society that was emerging in Europe at this time.

Eagle From Hell

According to research coming out of Australia, a giant eagle may have been carnivorous after all. The story, in PhysOrg states:

Ken Ashwell of the University of New South Wales in Australia and Paul Scofield of the Canterbury Museum in New Zealand wrote their conclusions in the peer-reviewed Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Using computed axial tomography, or CAT, the researchers scanned several skulls, a pelvis and a beak in an effort to reconstruct the size of the bird's brain, eyes, ears and spinal cord.

They compared their data on the Haast's eagle to characteristics of modern predator birds and scavenger birds to determine that the bird was a fearsome predator that ate the flightless moa birds and even humans.

Paul Scofield? Canterbury? What are the odds? Oh well, back to the story:

Scientists believe the Haast's eagle became extinct about 500 years ago, most likely due to habitat destruction and the extinction of its prey species at the hands of early Polynesian settlers. Before the humans colonized New Zealand about 750 years ago, the largest inhabitants were birds like the Haast's eagle and the moa.

Scofield said the findings are similar to what he found in Maori folk tales. "The science supports Maori mythology of the legendary pouakai or hokioi, a huge bird that could swoop down on people in the mountains and was capable of killing a small child," he said.

Although perhaps sensationalized, the story reminds one that the birds of the air are not the birds of yesteryear. The article doesn't say what the wingspan was but it must have been huge.