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Birds and Humans Through Time

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The How Birds Made Us Human hypothesis suggests that birds have had a huge influence on human evolution and the development of human cultures. It is a broad idea with many possible examples that scientists are still exploring. In 2019,  Kost and Hussain  described a three-part relationship between humans, birds, and the environment. They called their research area  Archaeo-ornithology . How Birds Made Us Human  looks at the many ways birds may have shaped human bodies, cultures, and technologies. It brings together research from fields like  Paleontology ,  Archaeology ,  Ethnography , and  History . We explore the following relationships with birds through time: Mesozoic Birds and the Rise of Primates Birds and mammals evolved together for over 100 million years before the first primates appeared on the scene. Often they would have shared habitats, and so birds would have interacted with our early mammal ancestors as competitors and predators. T...
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Biography of How Birds Made Us Human

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I've been kicking around many of the initial ideas here since at least 2005 when I was working on my urban bird conservation PhD dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin and working at Audubon. Starting in 2006 while conducting Mayan ethnornithology fieldwork in Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico with Kerry Hull, the role of birds in contem porary and ancient traditional cultures became my primary research interest.  Rob Fergus (front) and Kerry Hull with Lacandon Maya guide in Chiapas, Mexico The more I saw how birds fit into ancient and traditional human societies, the more I came to hypothesize that many of the technologies and behaviors that we consider to be uniquely human actually derived from an ancient pattern of copying bird behavior. I first presented this idea as a slide in “The Future of Urban Bird Conservation” presentation at the International Conference on Metropolitan  Planning and Ecology at Almere, Netherlands on 23 March 2017. The more I looked at how bi...
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