Birds have been adapting to human activity for millennia, study finds

About 14,500 to 10,500 years ago, during the transition from the last ice age, Epipaleolithic and Neolithic people harvesting vegetation from the wetlands of eastern Jordan created habitat for birds that otherwise would have migrated , according to a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory revealed.

This shows that human activity is not necessarily detrimental to biodiversity but can allow species to coexist in specific environments, the researchers suggest.

Human presence is generally associated with negative effects on flora and fauna, and our species has clearly negatively influenced biodiversity throughout history.

But in the study titled “Waterfowl eggshell refines paleoenvironmental reconstruction and supports multi-species niche construction during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in the Levant,” a team of researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Turin has discovered that certain human activities may have had an encouraging effect on biodiversity by modifying specific ecosystems.

“The ecosystem in question is the Shubayqa wetland in eastern Jordan, which is now only seasonally flooded. But recent evidence has shown that water was likely available for much of year-round and so it was also possible for waterfowl and other species to live there all day long. all year round if they had suitable habitat,” said zooarchaeologist Lisa Yeomans from the University from Copenhagen.

The team’s excavations at the Shubayqa sites showed that the Neolithic people who occupied these sites for varying periods of time not only harvested the emergent vegetation of the wetlands, but also hunted waterfowl and harvested their eggs and eggs. feathers.

“The presence of egg shells and bones of juvenile ducks and swans in the archaeological record indicates that these birds actually stayed year-round to breed in wetlands instead of returning to Europe. We know that modern descendants of these birds can stay and breed in the region, but only if the environment is suitable for them, and we believe that human management of wetland vegetation has provided them with suitable ecological niches through harvesting of vegetation,” added Lisa Yeomans.

Wetland management: a path to agriculture?

The archaeological cultures the researchers studied were periods when humans were on the cusp of developing agriculture. Recent studies have considered that habitat modification activities such as those documented in the Shubayqa wetlands in eastern Jordan may have played an important role in this process.

“We know that agriculture developed in this region shortly after these crops, and we suggest that intentional wetland management was an important step in this process. Efforts to modify wetlands have their fruits to the extent that they helped improve foraging opportunities in terms of waterfowl, eggs and feathers,” said anthropologist Camilla Mazzucato.

“New paleoproteomic methodologies have been developed to identify eggshell species. Breeding waterfowl at Shubayqa demonstrate the presence of year-round water in the wetland. This encouraged us to consider the action of humans and other species in environmental modification and to move beyond simple determinism.interpretations of climate-driven innovation.

“For millennia, humans and animals have cohabited in different environments, adapting to each other’s presence and actions, and this cohabitation has, we believe, been crucial to the innovations that subsequently led to “advent of agriculture.”