falconspace

Up and down that street, she remembered, television screens had flickered silent blue in the darkness. Strange loud birds, not of the neighborhood, were attracted, some content to perch in the palm trees, keeping silence and an eye out for the rats who lived in the fronds, others flying by close to windows, seeking an angle to sit and view the picture from. When the commercials came on, the birds, with voices otherworldly pure, would sing back at them, sometimes even when none were on.

# posted by Unknown : 5:52 PM

For nearly a decade, Cornell University researcher Christopher Clark has been eavesdropping on the ocean, hoping to decipher the enigmatic songs of whales.

Using old US Navy hydrophones once employed to track submarines, he has collected thousands of acoustical tracks of singing blue, fin, humpback and minke whales.

His bioacoustics lab is now able to pinpoint the location of individual singers, and determine the length of their song. As a result, he's had to redraw the map of whale acoustics.

"The range is enormous," explained Dr Clark. "They have voices that span an entire ocean."

Drawing on newly declassified acoustic data from the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), and using new tools that can crunch high volumes of them, Dr Clark has determined that whales' songs travel over thousands of kilometres and also that increasing noise pollution in the oceans impedes the animals' ability to communicate.

Booming voices

It is not certain whether whales thousands of kilometres apart communicate directly with each other, or what their messages contain. But the results support a 30-year theory that, before the advent of modern shipping, the animals' booming voices would have resounded from one ocean basin to another.

With sound that is loud and low, in other words, "beautifully designed" for long distance travel, the singing of a whale in the waters off Puerto Rico could carry 2,600km to the shores of Newfoundland, says Dr Clark.

When scientists create a digital map of the sound as it propagates in the water, it "illuminates the entire ocean", he adds.

The pan-oceanic range is fitting for massive 30-190-tonne creatures that rely on reflected sound, rather than light, to navigate.

"You are dealing with animals that are highly acoustically oriented," said Dr Clark. "Their consciousness and sense of self is based on sound, not sight."

Dr Clark and other whale researchers spoke at the recent annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC about how new technologies are revealing whale secrets at the same time that human activity continues to threaten their well-being.

He is particularly concerned with noise pollution, or "acoustic smog". Noise from shipping vessels doubled every decade, said Dr Clark, which means a whale's world decreases by a factor of two.

Over 20 years, its 1,600km acoustic radius shrinks to 400 km, and, presumably, limits the range over which animals can navigate and find food or mates.

"We are slowly, inexorably, raising the tide of ambient noise so that their worlds are shrinking just to the point where they're dysfunctional," Dr Clark believes.

Military Sonar

He distinguishes between the chronic noise from ships and the acute bursts of noise from military sonar, which recent evidence suggests startles the animals and leads to decompression sickness or stranding.

Despite the ban on commercial fishing, other menaces besides noise pollution, such as commercial fishing nets and ocean contaminants also continue to threaten the health of whale populations, according to Roger Payne, president of the conservation group Ocean Alliance.

His team is in the final year of a five-year expedition designed to establish the first baseline levels of synthetic pollutants in the ocean. Long-lived industrial pesticides, such as DDT and PCBs, re-concentrate as they move up the marine food chain. Whales are at the top of that chain.

"Insect repellents and insecticides which have been spread on fields on land have now gotten out to whales in mid-ocean," said Dr Payne.

His ship, the Odyssey, and its crew have travelled across the Pacific Ocean taking tissue samples of sperm whales, whose longevity allow plenty of time for chemicals to accumulate in their fatty tissue. They have collected 1,100 tissue samples so far, and have run preliminary analysis on 30 of them.

"We find these substances present in every single one of those samples," explained Dr Payne, who adds he will test all the samples once the voyage is complete.

"Toxic dumps"

The study will be the first global measure of pollution in a single species at the top of aquatic food chain, although high levels of pollutants in marine animals have been detected in previous studies.

PCB toxicity is defined as 50 parts of contaminant per million parts of animal, (50 milligrams per kilo) tests have revealed up to 400 ppm in killer whales, 3,200 in beluga whales and 6,800 in bottlenose dolphins.

It makes the animals "swimming toxic dump sites," according to Dr Payne.

Contaminants such as PCBs and DDT have been shown to inhibit a mammal's immune system, its ability to function, and the development of its young.

"The young receive roughly the contaminant concentration that their mother has, add to it what they get in their food during their lifetime, and then pass that double dose to their offspring," said Dr Payne.

He is also concerned about the possibility of what he calls "double stressors," in which seemingly weak threats to an animal are combined and create a one-two punch that causes serious harm, even death.

He cited a 2003 University of Pittsburgh study in which bullfrog tadpoles had little reaction to pesticides and to the smell of predators when exposed to them in separate experiments. When the stressors were combined, mortality rose to 80-90%.

Biologists had yet to determine whether such synergistic effects apply to other vertebrates, such as whales, said Dr Payne, who suggests that a combination of acute noise, contaminants or predation, could serve as double stressors.

While some whale populations are recovering since the 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling, anthropogenic influence may play a decisive role with populations that are at critical levels and endangered, such as the Northern right whale.

Specialised ecosystems

When whales are threatened, so are the specialised ecosystems that depend on them - and on their carcasses.

New research into whale falls - the sinking of whale carcasses to the ocean bottom - is revealing a weird and diverse assortment of creatures; some not found anywhere else in the ocean.

A whale fall is such a rare find that scientists like University of Hawaii oceanographer Craig Smith have made a practice of towing dead beached whales to sea and sinking them themselves.

"It's really a community service," said Dr Smith. "A rotting beached whale is a big, stinking mess."

Then they watch to see who shows up. A whale fall provides an organic smorgasbord - up to two million grams of carbon in its blubber and oily bones - for a host of creatures, some of which may be so specialised, they rely on dead whales to complete their lifecycle.

First scavengers such as hagfish appear and eat the soft tissue. Then bacteria and invertebrates devour the skeleton. Chemoautotrophs - including bone-eating zombie worms - gather when the bones begin to emit sulphide. At this stage, whale falls provide parallels to the sulphide-loving ecosystems at hydrothermal vents.

Scientists speculate that creatures that require sulphide may use whale falls as sulphide stepping stones - to disperse to new hydrothermal vent communities - and may even have a spot in the evolutionary lineage of some of the vent species, according to Dr Smith.

"It's quite possible that the ancestors of the giant tube worms on vents were actually animals that were living on dead whales," he says.

Bone-eating zombie worms

Evidence from DNA sequencing techniques also suggests that, not only may whale falls host more species than thrive at hydrothermal vents, some have highly specialised adaptations.

The bone-eating zombie worms, for example, use internal bacteria to break down the fats in the whalebone and appear to be unique to whale falls.

"It is increasingly evident that there are major kinds of habitats, major types of organisms with extreme evolutionary novelty that remain to be discovered," said Dr Smith.

But as the whales disappear, so do these exotic ecosystems.

By some estimates, large whale populations have been reduced by 75% as a consequence of whaling. Following conservation biology theory, said Dr Smith, a 75% drop in one population meant that 30-40% of the species that depend on it would go extinct.

"We are beginning to appreciate what whaling may have done to these specialised communities," explained Dr Smith. "And it's very likely that there either have been or - may be on-going - species extinctions on the deep sea floor connected with whaling.

When humanity's ancestors discovered, a million years or so ago, the exquisite pleasure of a hot meal by the fire, they might very well have set the mood with a little night music — a shimmering cadenza played on a slender bone flute, perhaps, or a hymn to the spirits belted out a cappella.

As researchers conclude in the current issue of the journal Science, the love of music, that unslakable, unshakable, indescribable desire to sing and rejoice, rattle and roll, is not only a universal feature of the human species, found in every society known to anthropology, but is also deeply embedded in multiple structures of the human brain, and is far more ancient than previously suspected.

In fact, what could be called the "music instinct" long antedates the human race, and may be as widespread in nature as is a taste for bright colors, musky perfumes and flamboyant courtship displays.

In twin articles that discuss the flourishing field of biomusicology — the study of the biological basis for the creation and appreciation of music — researchers present various strings of evidence to show that music-making is at once a primal human enterprise, and an art form with virtuoso performers throughout the animal kingdom.

The researchers discuss recent discoveries in France and Slovenia of musical instruments dating back to 53,000 years ago — more than twice the age of the famed Lascaux cave paintings or the palm-size "Venus" figurines. The instruments are flutes carved of animal bone, and are so sophisticated in their design as to suggest that humans had already been fashioning musical instruments for hundreds of thousands of years. And when Jelle Atema of the Marine Biology Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., an author on one of the new reports and an accomplished flutist who studied with the renowned Jean- Pierre Rampal, reconstructed his own versions of the archaic flutes from bits of ancient bone and gave them a blow, he and his collaborators were impressed by their sweetness and versatility.

"What you immediately hear when he plays these flutes is the beauty of their sound," said Patricia M. Gray, the lead author on the first of the two Science articles. "They make pure and rather haunting sounds in very specific scales.

"It didn't have to be this way," she added. "They could have sounded like duck calls." Dr. Gray, a professional keyboardist, is the artistic director of the National Musical Arts, the ensemble-in-residence at the National Academy of Sciences, and the head of the academy's Biomusic program, a group of scientists and musicians who, according to their mission statement, "explore the role of music in all living things."

The new reports also emphasize that humans hold no copyright on sonic brilliance, and that a number of nonhuman animals produce what can rightly be called music, rather than random drills, trills and cacophony. Recent in-depth analyses of the songs sung by birds and humpback whales show that, even when their vocal apparatus would allow them to do otherwise, the animals converge on the same acoustic and aesthetic choices and abide by the same laws of song composition as those preferred by human musicians, and human ears, everywhere.

For example, male humpback whales, who spend six months of each year doing little else but singing, use rhythms similar to those found in human music, and musical phrases of similar length — a few seconds. Whales are capable of vocalizing over a range of at least seven octaves, yet they tend to proceed through a song in stepwise lilting musical intervals, rather than careering madly from octave to octave; in other words, they sing in key. They mix percussive and pure tones in a ratio consonant with that heard in much Western symphonic music. They also follow a favorite device of human songsters, the so- called A-B-A form, in which a theme is stated, then elaborated on, and then returned to in slightly modified form.

Perhaps most impressive, humpback songs contain refrains that rhyme. "This suggests that whales use rhyme in the same way we do: as a mnemonic device to help them remember complex material," the researchers write. "It's very easy to play along with pure, unedited whale songs," said Dr. Gray, who has written movements for saxophone, piano and whale. "They're absolutely comprehensible to us."

Birds, too, compose songs with the same notes, rhythmic variations, harmonic patterns and pitch relationships as those found in human compositions. The hermit thrush, for example, considered one of the lushest of avian vocalists, sings in the so- called pentatonic scale, in which the octaves are divided into five notes. "This is a very recognizable and very pleasant scale that is found across many human cultures," Dr. Gray said. "The pentatonic scale is the scale on which the prehistoric flutes are built, and it's also the basis for a lot of rock 'n' roll music today." Birds of a feather, it seems, rock together.

The California marsh wren may sing as many as 120 themes in a given jam session, with each theme matched by its immediate neighbor in what is known among musicians as the call-response pattern. Some birds even use instruments: the palm cockatoo of Northern Australia selects a hollow log of a preferred resonance, and then breaks off a twig to use as a drumstick.

"Music is far, far older than our species," said Roger Payne, president of the Ocean Alliance in Lincoln, Mass., and a co-author on one of the papers. "It is tens of millions of years old, and the fact that animals as wildly divergent as whales, humans and birds come out with similar laws for what they compose suggests to me that there are a finite number of musical sounds that will entertain the vertebrate brain."

Neuroscientists have just begun getting a handle on how the brain perceives and appreciates music, and the results are as yet confusing and somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, Dr. Isabelle Peretz of the University of Montreal and her colleagues have studied patients with lesions in the auditory cortex that impair only their ability to recognize music, while leaving unscathed their power to understand speech, environmental sounds and other acoustic information.

Dr. Peretz's results suggest that the brain has something specifically designed to process music, although the precise location or nature of such a do-re-mi keeper remains unknown.

On the other hand, Dr. Mark Jude Tramo, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, argues in the second Science paper that neuroimaging studies of people performing or listening to music have failed to find a "music center" in the brain devoted strictly to music cognition.

All of the neural structures that participate in the musical experience, he argues, are players in other forms of cognition, auditory and otherwise. For example, Dr. Tramo says, a region called the left planum temporale, which is critical for perfect pitch, is also involved in language processing. And though the right hemisphere of the brain traditionally has been considered the "music hemisphere," recent neuroimaging studies from his and other laboratories reveal a more subtle interplay between the left and right halves of the brain in the course of a musical experience.

The left hemisphere seems particularly important for so-called "fast acoustic" processing, which would tell a listener whether, say, a note was being bowed on a violin or plucked on a guitar. The right hemisphere takes over in "slow acoustic" processing, appreciating the notes following that initial "attack." At which point, if all goes well, the brain cedes control to the body, and the party begins.

# posted by Unknown : 8:54 PM

"....many archaeologists think that the birds of prey were brought into the settlements for religious reasons, independently of the carcasses of other species which were part of the food supply.

But we can gain extra clues from an examination of the different kinds of birds of prey found among the remains. A first analysis seems to indicate a serious flaw in the hypothesis that birds of prey were used for hunting: the majority of the bones belong to the larger birds of prey, such as eagles, buzzards, vultures and eagle owl, while falcons are much less common.

The problem is that most of the larger birds of prey are unsuitable for hunting – at least, according to purists in the world of falconry."

# posted by Unknown : 8:36 PM

Grommet [Sacramento Bee]

Douglas Bell knew his peregrine falcon might soar over ranchers' fields in Yolo County and never return. Still, he released the bird, Grommet, to hunt last summer, only to discover Wednesday that the falcon had fallen prey to a thief in Bell's east Sacramento backyard.

Bell, a professor of biology at California State University, Sacramento, is now consumed by his search for the 6-year-old raptor, and concern for his welfare.

Aside from a hand-fed diet of pigeon and quail, falcons need special care, Bell said.

"Otherwise, you could traumatize them mentally," he said.

Sacramento Police spokeswoman Michelle Lazark said Thursday that a burglary detective will be assigned to the case. Bell describes the purloined bird as stocky and crow-sized, blue-black with a cream-rust torso, with a squeak like a rusty door hinge.

Bell said he went through a detailed process five years ago to obtain a permit for the endangered bird, which was raised by falcons in the Bay Area.

"It takes such a commitment," Bell said. "I feed him on my fist on the glove every day. I spend time with him to make him happy."

Bell has shown Grommet, a well-mannered bird, to his conservation and ornithology classes at CSUS, he said.

"(Students) love to see a live creature," he said.

Bell said he's studied the peregrine falcon since 1970, when birds populated only five of 100 California cliffs known as nesting sights. Now, the birds have bounced back, with about 350 adults in the state, he said.

"(Grommet) is a guide for me that tells me what wild birds are, in a sense, thinking," he said. "By living with a falcon, you develop a more intimate rapport with what wild birds are doing."

On hunting trips, Bell said, he takes Grommet to open fields where the bird flies out of sight, and returns to stalk the starlings and pigeons that Bell rouses from the fields.

"As a falconer, one accepts the fact that you have a probability of losing (the bird), or having some other raptor kill it. What's unacceptable is when a human comes along and takes him," Bell said.

Bell arrived home at 64th Street near Elvas Avenue to find Grommet's mews (the proper name for a falcon shed) broken into on Wednesday. He said the padlock had apparently been pried open with a crowbar.

"I was ... quite upset, largely because this is probably the worst thing to happen, to have the bird stolen by someone who doesn't know how to care for it," he said.

Bell said cooked meat or beef could be hazardous to Grommet's health, and his talons could be hazardous to his captor.

"If he's grabbed, he will try to defend himself," Bell said.

Bell posted fliers in his neighborhood on Thursday and said he's offering a $1,000 reward for anyone who provides information that leads to Grommet's safe return. He encourages anyone who has the bird to surrender him to city police, CSUS police or the CSUS biology department.

The Sacramento Police Department can be reached at (916) 433-0650. Bell can be reached at the CSUS biology department at (916) 278-6535 or dbell @csus.edu.

# posted by Unknown : 6:58 PM

A new theory pushes the origins of falconry deep into prehistory, perhaps to the end of the last Ice Age around 12,000-10,000 years ago. It may even have been one of the first steps for humans on the road to agriculture.

Falconry has long been regarded as a noble sport, and it has a very ancient pedigree. According to traditional views, people first began to use tame birds of prey for hunting game in central Asia during the first or second millennium BC. Through trade and other contacts, the practice then extended westwards into the Middle East, and eventually to Europe.

But that theory raises a major puzzle. The first artistic views of falconry come not from the Far East, but from Turkey. Several carvings from around 1500 BC show a large bird on the fist of a human figure. Grasped in the same fist is the figure of a hare (presumably the quarry) held by the back legs.

Another, somewhat later, example has been found in northern Iraq. Dated to the period of King Sargon II (722-705 BC), this bas-relief depicts a small bird of prey on the wrist of a man. Significantly, this carving seems to show ‘jesses’ (leather thongs used to secure the bird to the human fist), tied to the bird’s feet and passing between the thumb and forefinger of the falconer. If so, it may indicate that falconry (and its paraphernalia) was well developed by the eighth century BC in the Middle East.

In both cases, some researchers have interpreted these carvings as purely religious or symbolic scenes. But if these examples do indeed depict hawking, then the sport is at least 3,500 years old in Western Eurasia.

New meat on old bones

Archaeological excavations are now throwing an exciting new light on the origin of falconry in the Middle East, along with new clues to the reasons why – and when – it began. The name of the game is zooarchaeology - the study of the bones of fossil mammals and birds.

In recent years, archaeologists have excavated many early human settlements in Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq and Iran which date back to 8000-10,000 BC. Among the remains, they have consistently uncovered the bones of birds of prey. Most researchers interpret these bones as remnants of food left by the humans living at those sites, or as elements of religious activities.

But could there be an alternative explanation? For example, these fragile remains might represent the earliest management and training of living birds of prey - and the possible first faltering steps towards falconry. (The term ‘falconry,’ incidentally, is used to cover all trained birds of prey, not just the birds known as falcons.)

In order to explore this idea further, we need to put these finds into perspective. That means:

* understanding the significance of other animal bones from these early sites
* exploring the historical records of falconry, and the current practices of peoples who still hunt with birds of prey
* placing these data within the environmental and cultural context of the world as it was ten millennia ago.

Late Stone Age diet

Remains from these early sites have surprised archaeologists by revealing the inhabitants exploited a broad and diverse range of mammals and birds. It marks a major shift in human diet. Earlier in the Stone Age, people tended to hunt mainly the larger mammals. But during the short period of human history from 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, the economic focus of hunting in the Middle East appears to shift from large mammal species towards a broader range of food – most importantly, a greater reliance on smaller animals.

The range of mammals and birds remains at all these sites is very similar. They include gazelle, fox and hare, as well as game birds such as partridges, francolins and sandgrouse. Hunters must have been both skilled and versatile in order to catch enough of these small species to feed their settlement. They certainly used a variety of techniques to capture their prey, including trapping, netting, digging and perhaps even poisoning.

Perhaps the birds of prey found at these sites were also part of the repertoire of hunting techniques - an additional means of catching smaller prey species. In other words, was falconry first developed and employed as one of the hunting strategies in the Middle East as early as the late Stone Age?

Which birds were used?

Although we find bones of predator birds and prey species in the same deposits, this doesn’t prove that these birds were used to hunt the prey. As mentioned above, many archaeologists think that the birds of prey were brought into the settlements for religious reasons, independently of the carcasses of other species which were part of the food supply.

But we can gain extra clues from an examination of the different kinds of birds of prey found among the remains. A first analysis seems to indicate a serious flaw in the hypothesis that birds of prey were used for hunting: the majority of the bones belong to the larger birds of prey, such as eagles, buzzards, vultures and eagle owl, while falcons are much less common.

The problem is that most of the larger birds of prey are unsuitable for hunting – at least, according to purists in the world of falconry. The smaller eagles and some buzzards are mainly scavengers and carrion feeders, and will only occasionally hunt live prey. Other large species, like the vulture, can easily be trained to fly to the hand but apparently cannot be made to kill anything. Falconers today generally use a relatively select range of species, all at the smaller end of the size range. These include the larger bird-killing falcons (such as the peregrine, the lanner, the saker and sometimes the gyrfalcon) and the majority of goshawks and sparrow-hawks – precisely the kinds of bird that are rare in the Middle Eastern archaeological sites.

But can we be sure that ancient falconers followed the same practice? All birds of prey can be easily tamed and trained, and present-day falconers in Central Asia, India, and even Europe have trained a whole host of larger birds of prey to fly and hunt, some more successfully than others.

Golden eagles, for example, can be trained to catch something as large and formidable as a wolf. In Uzbekistan, and Khazakstan today, some skilled hunters still depend upon golden eagles to catch hares, foxes and wolves for their skins, which are then sold.Various travellers in Central Asia have described the use of eagles for hunting large quarry. In the thirteenth century, Marco Polo participated in a hunt using eagles with the great Kublai Khan and commented: "He has also a great multitude of eagles which are very well trained to hunt; for they take wolves and foxes and buck and roe deer, hares and other small animals."

In 1559, the European traveller A. Jenkinson reported seeing Tartars using "Haukes" (probably golden eagles) to hunt wild horses and states that "they are used to bewilder the hunted animal." Lieutenant D. Carruthers in 1949 described natives of Tarim using eagles to bring wild pig to bay, so the hunters can close in and club the victim to death. In these cases the eagle has little more than nuisance value, but it's sufficient to confuse the quarry in order to bring it to bay and bag.

Of particular significance are the comments of Aelian (circa. AD 220), supposedly quoting ‘Ctesias the Cnydian.’ Ctesias was court doctor to the Persian King Artexeises II (Mnemnon) in the early fifth century BC. His early treatise on falconry describes the country and customs of the ‘pygmies’, a mysterious people inhabiting some part of Central Asia. He states that "they hunt hares and foxes with crows, yellow-breasted marten cats and with cornices and eagles." (Other translations suggest crows, kites, rooks and eagles were used).

Ctesias also provides details of how these unlikely species were trained to catch hares and foxes. "They catch young eagles and also the young of ravens and vultures, bring them up and train them for hunting. The procedure is as follows. They hang meat on a tame hare or a tamed fox and let it run; then they send the birds after them and permit them to take hold of the meat. The birds try this with all their might, and when they have caught up with the one or the other, they may take the meat as a prize and this for them is a great lure. When they have been brought to precision in this type of hunting, the Indians let them loose on mountain hares and wild foxes. In hope of the usual meal, they chase after the prey which appears, and catch it very quickly."

This description helps to solve another problem for the falconry hypothesis – the presence of vulture remains at these early sites. By their very nature, vultures in the wild are carrion feeders and do not hunt and kill live prey. However, if the remarkable evidence from Ctesias can be believed, vultures appear to have been trained to catch hares and foxes in the fifth century BC.

Vultures can certainly be easily tamed and trained to fly to hand, particularly the Egyptian vulture, which is flown today at several bird of prey centres around Britain. Even if the vultures at these sites weren’t actually used for hunting, falconers may have used them to train smaller birds of prey to hunt the larger ones, a common practice described in the historic literature.

Eagle-owl bones at many of the Stone Age sites add another interesting dimension to the falconry hypothesis. This extremely powerful bird of prey can also be trained to hunt a range of prey, and eagle owls are particularly effective at dusk or even at night. A small group of falconers today use the eagle owl in this way. A Persian treatise on falconry (the Baznama-Yi Nasiri, translated by Lt Col. E. S. Harcourt and Lt Col. D. C. Phillott in 1868) states that "what the golden eagle is to the day, the eagle owl is to the night. Hares and foxes fall an easy prey to it."

Others have described how hunters can use eagle owls - along with other owl species - to lure other large birds of prey to the ground, where they can be captured or killed. This method works very well, particularly if the owl is left disabled or tethered on the ground, where it is invariably attacked and mobbed by other birds of prey.

Falconry and religion

Several researchers have offered a religious or symbolic explanation for the presence of the numerous bird-of-prey remains at the later prehistoric sites of the Near and Middle East. The idea is supported by the ritualistic importance attached by many cultures in historical times to birds of prey - perhaps the most famous being the Plains Indians of North America, with their large eagle-feather head-dresses. In the vast majority of cases, they practise cultural or religious rituals where wild birds of prey are captured and killed.

Recent evidence from the Kirghiz of Central Asia shows that falconry has played a major role in their religious beliefs. The Kirghiz believed the eagle to be the ancestor of the shaman - the priest who used magic to heal the sick and control the future. Because shamans were believed to be the first hunters, all hunters were also considered to be saints. When a pregnant woman experienced difficulty in childbirth, shamans thought an evil spirit caused her suffering. A strong brave berkhut (tame golden eagle) was brought to her bedside, since the evil spirits were thought to be afraid of its eyes. The killing of a fox by the berkhut was also perceived to be a symbol of fertility.

The hunt itself was also subject to set rituals: "the night before the hunt, the berkutcheu [eagle falconer] washes himself, abstains from any sexual involvement or alcohol and the berkhut is fed only white meat washed to rid it of blood".

So it is quite possible that falconry (the management and training of live birds of prey) may have served a dual spiritual and utilitarian role at these early sites.

Falconry, foraging and farming

How can a study of the antiquity of falconry possibly contribute to our understanding of human society and culture in the late Stone Age, as the last Ice Age drew to a close?

This was the period when human groups in the Near and Middle East underwent a radical change in their economic and social life. Archaeological remains testify to one of the most significant events in human history - the shift from a nomadic life of hunting and gathering wild resources to a settled one of farming with the first domestication of crops and livestock. This momentous event led inextricably to a rapid rise in human population, the subsequent emergence of the first major civilisations and a radical re-shaping of the world as we know it.

The sites we’ve been discussing in the Near and Middle East provide significant insights into this transition. The remains contain such a wide range of species that it seems the inhabitants were facing a rapid decline in their food resources - perhaps because they were over-exploiting a hunting territory that was forever diminishing. This is certainly a plausible explanation for these hunters apparently shifting towards smaller, less rewarding, species. It was perhaps the driving force that funnelled many of these groups down the road towards agriculture as their only alternative survival strategy.

Eating smaller species must have meant changes in the way that people hunted them down – and using birds of prey might have been one solution. What’s most intriguing is that this period coincides with the appearance of the domestic dog. Descended from tamed wolves, the dog may have served as a hunting aid and companion. Thus the origins of falconry, developed as an additional hunting strategy (with possible spiritual or religious dimensions), may be linked with the domestication of the dog.

If the bird-of-prey remains at these sites do indeed represent evidence of experimentation with their taming and management, then birds of prey may take their place (along with the dog) as the earliest domestic animals. More important, both must have been extremely influential in setting the scene for the subsequent domestication of the later economically important species - sheep, goat, cattle and pigs.

On the basis of all the available evidence, the significance of bird-of-prey bones recovered from these early sites remains very much open to debate. Whether they simply represent domestic food refuse, symbolic artefacts or the remains of tamed and managed birds, is still far from clear. The idea that birds of prey were domesticated before the advent of agriculture, and may have even contributed to its beginnings, may still be a theory – worthy of further, more critical consideration – but it potentially offers crucial insights into our origins.

Copyright (c) FirstScience.com

Dr. Keith [name witheld] is a research fellow in the Environmental Archaeology Unit, University of [name witheld]. He specialises in the study of animal and human bones from archaeological sites. His major areas of research include the origins of domestication and ancient DNA.

# posted by Unknown : 9:43 AM

This elegantly composed collage of torn-and-pasted paper is a playful, almost syncopated composition in which uneven squares seem to dance within the space. As the title suggests, it was created not by the artist's design, but by chance. In 1915 Arp began to develop a method of making collages by dropping pieces of torn paper on the floor and arranging them on a piece of paper more or less the way they had fallen. He did this in order to create a work that was free of human intervention and closer to nature. The incorporation of chance operations was a way of removing the artist's will from the creative act, much as his earlier, more severely geometric collages had substituted a paper cutter for scissors, so as to divorce his work from "the life of the hand."

# posted by Unknown : 7:41 AM

"Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation."

Jean Arp

# posted by Unknown : 9:21 PM