Birds of prey and humans in prehistoric Europe: A view from El Mirón Cave, Cantabria (Spain)

Beatrice Demarchi,Samantha Presslee,Igor Gutiérrez-Zugasti,Manuel González-Morales,Ana B Marín-Arroyo,Lawrence G Straus,Roman Fischer

doi:10.1016/j.jasrep.2019.01.010

Abstract

Bird eggs can become part of the archaeological record either accidentally or as a result of human activities but, in both instances, they can reveal important aspects of the environment at the site, the ways in which people chose to exploit it, and even the existence of subtle ecological balances between humans and other animals. This is the case for El Mirόn, one of the most important cave sites in Cantabrian Spain, with occupation levels spanning around 40,000 years, from the late Middle Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age. This mountainous area in Cantabria was an ideal environment for hunting medium-sized game and, as such, supported both human and non-human predators, including birds of prey.Here we use a combination of peptide mass fingerprinting (by MALDI-MS) and protein sequencing (by LC-MS/MS) in order to taxonomically identify ninety-five fragments of eggshells recovered from nineteen archaeological layers. We firmly identify these as diurnal birds of prey (Accipitridae) and suggest that the species might have been bearded vulture, based on previous taphonomic studies that highlighted its presence at the cave. The implication is that both species of diurnal predators, humans and birds, inhabited the cave and used the surrounding environment during different periods of the year.

Highlights

Birds are liminal animals, connecting sky and earth, and as such have inhabited both the real and the symbolic worlds of humans since early prehistory (Serjeantson, 2009)
We found that the preservation of the intracrystalline proteins is overall very good, and this study is the first to report proteomics-based taxonomic identification of eggshell from a Paleolithic site from a relatively temperate environment
Peptide YSAWEGDDPPK from ansocalcin is present among the main peptides detected by both MALDI-MS and LC-MS/MS

Summary

Introduction

Birds are liminal animals, connecting sky and earth, and as such have inhabited both the real and the symbolic worlds of humans since early prehistory (Serjeantson, 2009). It is not a coincidence that one of the few pictorial representations of the human figure in parietal prehistoric art, in the “Shaft of the dead man” at Lascaux, is a bird-man fighting a bison, and the whole scene is enigmatically observed by a bird on a pole (Lewis-Williams, 2002). The preservation bias affecting bird remains, as well as the lack of widespread iconographic representations, have consistently hindered all efforts to gain a deeper understanding of the reciprocal relationship between humans and birds in the past. In order to assess whether eggshell can add another dimension of understanding to archaeo-faunal assemblages and, by extension, to how humans behaved in a certain landscape in the past, we focus on a long archaeological sequence from Cantabria, Northern Spain, spanning ~40,000 years from the late Middle Palaeolithic to the Bronze Age in the cave of El Mirón

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