Remote-Url: https://web.archive.org/web/20210929001715/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/science/most-dangerous-bird-cassowary.html
Retrieved-at: 2021-10-12 22:15:53.269716+00:00

The southern cassowary is often called the world’s most dangerous bird.While shy and secretive in the forests of its native New Guinea and Northern Australia, it can be aggressive in captivity. In 2019, kicks from a captive cassowarymortally wounded a Florida man.They don’t take kindly to attempts to hunt them, either: In 1926, acassowary attacked by an Australian teenagerkicked him in the neck with its four-inch, velociraptor-like talons, slitting his throat.Not a bird it’s advisable to spend too much time in close quarters with, in other words. But as early as 18,000 years ago, people in New Guinea may have reared cassowary chicks to near-adulthood — potentially the earliest known example of humans managing avian breeding.“This is thousands of years before domestication of the chicken,” said Kristina Douglass, an archaeologist at Penn State University and lead author on the study, which waspublished Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.The first people arrived on New Guinea at least 42,000 years ago. Those settlers found rain forests stalked by large, irritable, razor-footed cassowaries — and eventually worked out how to put them to use. During excavations of rock shelter sites in the island’s eastern highlands, Susan Bulmer, an archaeologist from New Zealand, collected artifacts and bird remains that ended up at the National Museum and Art Gallery of Papua New Guinea. Among those remains were 1,019 fragments of cassowary eggshell, likely plucked from wild cassowary nests.