How Did Humans Start Talking?

How did a wild nest become something humans could eventually count on for food? In this episode of Ancient Human, we trace the long archaeological history of eggs—from ostrich eggshell containers at Diepkloof Rock Shelter and burned giant-bird eggshell in prehistoric Australia to chicken domestication and the repeated appearance of chicken eggshell in ancient Central Asian settlements. Eggs create a surprisingly difficult archaeological problem. The edible part disappears almost immediately. A broken shell might come from a human meal, a hatched chick, a predator, trampling, wildfire, or an abandoned nest. So simply finding ancient eggshell is not enough. Researchers have to ask harder questions. Was the shell deliberately modified? Was it exposed to localized heat? Can proteins identify the bird species? Does eggshell appear repeatedly in domestic contexts strongly enough to suggest routine consumption? The evidence becomes stronger step by step. At Diepkloof, humans were unquestionably modifying ostrich eggshell tens of thousands of years ago. In Australia, distinctive heating patterns on Genyornis eggshell provide strong evidence that people were deliberately collecting and heating giant bird eggs. Much later, domesticated chickens brought the producer itself into the human environment. And by the later centuries BCE in parts of Central Asia, chicken eggshell appears repeatedly enough in household deposits to suggest that eggs had become ordinary food rather than an occasional seasonal opportunity. That may be the biggest change in the entire story. Ancient humans probably did not need to “discover” that eggs were edible. The real transformation was moving from finding an egg at the right place and season... to living in a world where the bird—and eventually the egg—had become part of a human-controlled food system. Research & References: Texier et al. (2010), A Howiesons Poort tradition of engraving ostrich eggshell containers dated to 60,000 years ago at Diepkloof Rock Shelter, South Africa, PNAS. Diehl, Keller & Hodgkins (2022), Towards an interpretive framework for heated ostrich eggshell: An actualistic study, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Miller et al. (2016), Human predation contributed to the extinction of the Australian megafaunal bird Genyornis newtoni ~47 ka, Nature Communications. Demarchi et al. (2022), Ancient proteins resolve controversy over the identity of Genyornis eggshell, PNAS. Kaisin et al. (2018), Foraging strategies underlying bird egg predation by macaques, American Journal of Primatology. Peters et al. (2022), The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens, PNAS. Peters et al. (2024), Archaeological and molecular evidence for ancient chickens in Central Asia, Nature Communications. Niespolo et al. (2026), Improved 14C and novel 230Th/U burial dating of Australian megafaunal avian eggshells: implications for the extinction of Genyornis and early human arrival to Sahul, Quaternary Science Reviews. #AncientHuman #Prehistory #Archaeology