Ancient Cave Art May Depict Giant Bird Extinct For 40,000 Years

grrlscientist writes "Recently studied Australian Aboriginal rock art may depict a giant bird that is thought to have become extinct some 40,000 years ago, thereby making it the oldest rock painting on the island continent. The red ochre drawing was first discovered two years ago, but archaeologists were only able to confirm the finding two weeks ago, when they first visited the remote site on the Arnhem Land plateau in north Australia. 'Genyornis was a giant flightless bird that was taller and heavier than either the ostrich or emu. It had powerful legs and tiny wings, and probably closely resembled ducks and geese, its closest living relatives. ... Interestingly, Genyornis bones have been excavated in association with human artifacts in Cuddie Springs in the Australian state of New South Wales. It is likely that humans lived alongside these birds, and some scientists think that humans may have contributed to their extinction." Jamie recalled that in the essay "A Lesson from the Old Masters," in the volume Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms, Stephen Jay Gould thanks our ancestors who drew Irish Elk on cave walls for "providing the only possible evidence for a hump that would otherwise have disappeared into the maw of lost history."

Comments

Re:This just in!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Hey, it's just the clueless archaeologists misinterpreting reality. What happened was that six thousand years ago, the cavemen found some faked fossils and tried to imagine how that animal might have looked like if it had actually existed.

Re:This just in!

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. 20k years from now people may believe an "Iron Man" or "Iron Men" lived among us.

Re:humans may have contributed to their extinction

[maugle]

OK, you're part of some primitive tribe living in the same area as a bunch of giant, flightless, and probably very tasty birds. Wouldn't you prefer hunting those huge birds instead of smaller animals that are more difficult to catch?

Since they didn't have any concept of "sustainability", it's very easy to imagine those humans contributing to the birds' extinction.

Re:This just in!

[Forge]

So dose This mean Dinosaurs walked with man, or that Dinosaurs could draw?

Re:Crayola

[osu-neko]

But then we figured, nah, its probably this big giant extinct bird instead...

Well, yes. When you find a picture that looks like a bird, but not quite like the emus you knew were around, you might think it's a badly drawn emu. But when you discover that the features that made you think it was badly drawn turn out to exactly match the features of some other species, you can (a) continue to assume it's a badly drawn emu that happens to, by remarkable coincidence, be badly drawn in just the right way to make it looks rather like some other species, or (b) you can now assume it's that other species.

Occam's razor is better satisfied by assume it is what it most resembles, not a badly drawn something else, with the coincidence that the badly drawn features happen to match the features of something else.

Using the extinction to date the painting?

[Dragoniz3r]

So, we think the bird went extinct 40k years ago, so we're using that to date the painting as being that old? Does that seem backwards to anyone else? How about we date the painting, then maybe we can get a better estimate of exactly when these birds went extinct?

Re:Using the extinction to date the painting?

[PopeRatzo]

So, we think the bird went extinct 40k years ago, so we're using that to date the painting as being that old?

Of course not. There could have been a 35000 year-old member of the tribe who painted the picture.

There has been a steady stream of evidence for human civilization much much earlier than is currently accepted. If I were a betting man, I'd bet that in my lifetime, there's going to be a revision of just how old humanity really is. Since anthropologists went way out on a limb 100 years ago and tied their estimates for the beginnings of human civilization to some notion of biblical "history" they have been working very hard to protect themselves from any challenge. Any evidence for civilization going back 25,000 or 55,000 or 150,000 years is simply ignored as being an "outlier". It must be spurious, they say, because it does not fit with our current theories. If those theories were to fall, so would the doctoral dissertations and published manuscripts of hundreds and hundreds of highly respected members of their fraternity.

Every so often, someone like, say, Michael Tellinger, or Robert Bauval, who is a member in good standing of the club, dares to present evidence suggesting that the current estimates of human origins are way off. Those people are quickly and efficiently made to not exist in the collective consciousness of anthropology. When it comes to dealing with people who challenge conventional wisdom, anthropologists can be practically Stalinist in the ruthless way they can forget formerly prestigious fellows ever existed.

Re:Using the extinction to date the painting?

[zerro]

of course, if we RTFA, we note that they plan on doing just that "Further studies, such as radiocarbon dating of the paint, are planned."

Re:Using the extinction to date the painting?

[bwilli123]

What is really interesting about this is the age of the rock art, which would seem to be as old as any human art anywhere and make the case for the Jawoyn Aborigines having one of the oldest cultures in the world. .

from the original article

The Jawoyn people say they are excited the painting could be Australia's oldest dated rock art. The Jawoyn are a group of Indigenous peoples who are the traditional owners of the land in Australia's Northern Territory...

What leads you to believe that as successive waves of humans entered Australia that the current occupants are in any way related to the painting's creators? Were the original inhabitants pushed further south,overrun,wiped out,walked to Tasmania? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/05/070509161829.htm

"At the time of the migration, 50,000 years ago, Australia and New Guinea were joined by a land bridge and the region was also only separated from the main Eurasian land mass by narrow straits such as Wallace's Line in Indonesia. The land bridge was submerged about 8,000 years ago...

Given 30,000 years plus at the front door entrance to Australia I think the Jarwoyn are the least likely descendants of the original artists.

A distant cousin of the Moa?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it's worth considering that Australia's neighbour, New Zealand, has had pretty much the largest flightless bird, at 12ft (~4m) high the Moa, hunted to extinction by the Maori. It's considered to be a cousin of the Australian Emu. Little need for wings with no mammals around for all those thousands of years..

Relatedly NZ has had by far the world's largest eagle, often depicted in indigenous culture carrying away small humans (think "children").

Not a very good way to date a painting...

[Spykk]

Who is to say that the descriptions of the bird were not passed down in legends? It seems entirely possible to me that the bird was painted after they had become extinct.

Re:Not a very good way to date a painting...

[wkcole]

Who is to say that the descriptions of the bird were not passed down in legends? It seems entirely possible to me that the bird was painted after they had become extinct.

The answer to precisely that question is in the article, lifted directly from one of its source articles.

More generally, the surprise about the age of this rock art isn't a matter of a century or two, or even really a millennium or five. The paleontologists and archaeologists are saying 40kya, the rock art expert is saying 5-10kya. There are very few cultures in the world which are known to have postulated anything older than 10kya as the beginning of humankind, and those which have done so tell stories of old times that are far from accuracy or precision. Getting the beak, leg, and claw shapes of an extinct bird passed down correctly through 30ky+ would be an unrivaled feat of trivial fact preservation.

Re:humans may have contributed to their extinction

[v1]

and some scientists think that humans may have contributed to their extinction."

Well for starters, imagine the omlets you could get from that thing! Eggs were a primary food source for almost every hunter-gatherer society back in those times. It certainly wouldn't be the only example of man hunting a species to extinction.

Australia is an isolated continent, and as such it works almost like an island, with a very fragile, mutually-dependent ecosystem. If you want to get more abstract with this, one could even say that man was responsible for their extinction yet never hunted them or their eggs... maybe man for some reason hunted some specific lizard to extinction, which also happened to be their primary food source? Weird subtle interactions like that can occur on islands.

Man is good at causing these sorts of problems because as a species he's very organized. If Grok figures out that those eggs are easy to find and good eating, it doesn't take 25 generations of evolution to breed "nest hunting" behavior into the village. It takes a few months locally, maybe a few years across the entire area. Other species just can't adapt to something that fast. I don't think it's proper to "blame man" for this, it's just the next advancement in evolution. But it is unfortunate. And I think it's something that we just need to understand and accept at some level. Particularly for our behavior in the past when these subtle yet potent interactions weren't understood or respected.

Re:This just in!

[MyLongNickName]

I have mod points but thought I would comment instead.

To you and the clueless fucks who modded you up to +5 Insightful: Yes, you must think you are brilliant. Of course the archeologists have no idea that cave drawings represent reality. This is an absolutely new concept to them.

It could have nothing to do with verifying that, yes indeed, this animal did go extinct in the time period they thing it did. It has nothing to do with showing the relationships the people had with the bird (was it food? was it considered to be good luck?) or how accurately the drawings represented the actual bird (based on fossilized remains). Or probably a dozen other insights that I would never think of.

But yes, you oh brilliant 13 year old on Slashdot because Mom won't let you go out and play in the rain have skewered their efforts completely.

Frankly, it is the +5 Insightful that set me off. How stupid can you be?

Midwest

[DrugCheese]

I've read stories of American Indian culture talking about the giant birds in the midwest states. South of me here along the Mississippi near Alton Illinois there apparently used to be a giant painting of a bird on the side of a bluff near a cave. Unfortunately the bluff was destroyed by the nearby state prison for gravel.

A cousin of the Moa?

[delire]

Last post disappeared to /dev/null. Trying again.

It's perhaps worth considering that Australia's neighbour New Zealand had what's probably the world's largest flightless bird at 4m tall (12ft) , the Moa. Much like the Kiwi, it simply didn't need to keep wings as their were no mammals with which to compete. It was soon hunted to extinction by Maori settlers some 500 years ago. Of note it's considered to be a relative of the Australian Emu..

While the rest of the bird kingdom in NZ devolved their wings, the world's biggest eagle, The Haast Eagle enjoyed the easy life, often making short work of the Moa from time to time.

Maybe I am too skeptic

[aBaldrich]

Now my question is, was this bird really extinct 40k years ago? Or is it an estimation? Because, maybe, they could have lived on longer than they thought.

Re:Maybe I am too skeptic

[jfengel]

It's an estimation. All data points that old are estimates, and thinner on the ground than you'd like. So each new data point is potentially very handy in establishing the chronology of what happened when on the continent.

Either the people were there earlier, or the bird there later, than previously thought. They have reason to believe it's the former (20,000 year old fossils should be easier to find than 40,000 year old ones), and it fits well into a picture that humans came and helped wipe the bird out. They've found skeletons of this bird in the same caves as evidence of human habitation, but the timing is hard to sort out. This data point helps make the picture more clear, if still not perfectly clear.

Gamey, what a loaded word.

[zippthorne]

I've heard "gamey" used to describe all manner of meats (including Bison, of all things) which, once I've tried them, have turned out to be flavorful and delicious. I've come to the conclusion that "gamey" means "doesn't taste like bland chicken" thus putting it outside of the comfort zone of the McDonald's generation of "connoisseurs."

Also, one of those animals, the pig, is certainly *not* an herbivore, and coincidentally is the second most delicious of the bunch. Undomesticated pigs, who are both not Herbivores, and actually have the diet to prove it, are even more delicious than the domesticated variety in this writer's opinion.

Therefore I'm hard pressed to conclude, having never tried other predators, mammalian or fowl, that they would necessarily be less delicious than the animals I have heretofore consumed.

Re:Gamey, what a loaded word.

[bogjobber]

Bear and cougar are appropriately described as gamey. Edible and not disgusting by any means, but very stringy and certainly not something you would eat outside of necessity or novelty.

But when bison, venison, elk, etc. are described as gamey it's for one of two reasons. Reason #1 is because it was taken from a less-than ideal animal. Aged females and adult males are less tasty than their younger, relatively hormone-free relatives. That's why in domesticated animals, males destined for slaughter and sale are neutered before they start to mature sexually. Animals taken in the wild obviously are not raised in the same controlled environments. Climate or disease might lead the animals to be much leaner and wirey in some years than they normally are. And very generally speaking the older the animal is, the less tender the meat.

Reason #2 is that people don't understand how to cut or cook lean meat. People treat it same way they would beef, when that potentially could ruin the flavor. Many game processors will cut deer or elk it into thick steaks, but you really want thinner strips that can be cooked on lower heats and for shorter times to preserve the flavor. The meat is leaner and displays a lower amount of marbling than beef, and if you cook it past medium the gamey taste will become more pronounced. But if you get it from a restaurant or educate yourself on how to cook it properly, you should be able to enjoy the experience fully.

I grew up in a family that hunted and ate pretty much everything and it's amazing how badly people can ruin some of the most delicious, healthy meat in the world.