How We Learned That Neanderthals Bird-Hunted in Winter

A stocky male figure walks along a beach in what is now Gibraltar, on the southwestern tip of Europe, his pronounced brow shading his eyes. Pigeons watch over him on the cliffs overlooking the plain. Ducks float in the ocean off in the distance, and crows weave in and out of smoke from fires in the Rock of Gibraltar’s caves, and a trio of vultures surrounds a decaying ibex carcass. He turns from the birds to head home: Soon, he will depart on a 100-mile trek to hunt in the mountains.

That’s a likely World Heritage status. There’s a growing trend to use bird remains found in Neanderthal digs to help reconstruct the Neanderthal’s life: the things they wore, the trips they went on, and the ecology of the places they lived. The same cadre of birds like pigeons, ducks, and crows were still around back then, and now they might be trying to tell us the secrets of our hominid ancestors, says Clive Finlayson, director at the Gibraltar Museum. “When I started looking at the birds in these caves, my eyes opened when I saw these windows into the past.”