Rather than being a food source, it's most likely that the birds were brought across from Europe to satiate the growing pigeon-breeding trend among hobbyists, said Michael Habib, a paleontologist in the Dinosaur Institute at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, and the University of Southern California. In cities, they became increasingly valuable as airborne messengers that could deliver important information across large distances.įrom there, humanity's appreciation for the animals only grew: Although pigeons were initially domesticated as a food source, "as other poultry became more popular, pigeons fell out of favor for eating and people began breeding them as a hobby," said Elizabeth Carlen, a doctoral student at Fordham University in New York City who studies the evolution of urban pigeons.īy the 1600s, rock doves - non-native to the United States - had reached North America, transported by ships in the thousands. Ancient records show that Mediterranean sailors used the birds to point floundering ships toward land (opens in new tab). As the birds grew more popular in the Middle East, North Africa and Western Europe in the ensuing centuries, people began to tap into their innate talent for navigation - the same skill that makes homing pigeons famous today.
Along the way, humans began to realize that pigeons were useful for much more than their meat.
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