Pigeons may be familiar sights in city life, but new archaeological evidence suggests their relationship with humans began far earlier than scientists once thought.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, bones found in Cyprus indicate that people were living with pigeons roughly 3,400 years ago — about 1,000 years earlier than previous direct evidence had suggested.
A new study published in Antiquity analyzed 159 common pigeon, or rock dove, bones from Hala Sultan Tekke, a Late Bronze Age harbor city in southeast Cyprus.
Researchers said the findings suggest pigeons were already partly domesticated around 1400 B.C.E. The previous earliest evidence for domesticated pigeons came from Hellenistic Greece and dated to about the fourth century B.C.E.
Distinguishing wild pigeons from domesticated ones by bone shape alone is difficult because their skeletons vary widely. To get around that problem, the team turned to chemical clues preserved in the bones.
Some of the pigeons appeared to have diets much like those of humans living in Cyprus at the time. Scientists think this meant the birds were eating human-provided food or leftovers.
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Many of the bones had been burned and buried in a sacred area alongside remains from other animals associated with feasting.
Taken together, those details suggest the pigeons were animals intentionally woven into human life.
Modern city pigeons did not simply appear out of nowhere. Humans once relied on them for food, fertilizer, companionship, and message delivery. Even after tools like the telegraph and telephone replaced one of pigeons' best-known jobs, the birds remained closely tied to human settlements.
The work also opens the door to more archaeological research into how humans shaped species over time.
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"Pigeons have been with humans for a very, very long time," study co-author Anderson Carter said, per Smithsonian Magazine. "We've shaped their whole species, and they've shaped many of our stories and histories."
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