They have been our meat and our messengers, a source of fertilizer and a religious symbol: While pigeons are now mostly reviled as dirty city pests, they long played an important role in human society.
Now, research published on Thursday has revealed that the humble birds were first domesticated 3,500 years ago, meaning they have been enmeshed in our lives for nearly a millennium longer than previously thought.
"Humans forgetting about pigeons happened relatively recently in human history," Anderson Carter, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
Pigeons were still a useful part of society as recently as the 19th and 20th centuries, explained the lead author of a new study in the journal Antiquity.
"They were still being used to carry messages and even had an important role in wars in particular," she added.
