'Smart' Neanderthals wore eagle talons as jewellery

Neanderthals successfully modified white-tailed eagle claws to make jewellery 130,000 years ago before the appearance of modern humans in Europe, says a fascinating study.

This is a tell-tale sign that Neanderthals manipulated the claws for use as jewellery pieces such as a necklace or pendant.

To reach this conclusion, researchers analysed eight mostly complete white-tailed eagle talons from the Krapina Neanderthal site in present-day Croatia.

The talons show cut marks and patterns of wear that suggest the claws were donned as personal ornaments.

Four talons bear multiple edge-smoothed cut marks and all eight show polishing facets or abrasion.

Three of the largest talons have small notches at roughly the same place along the plantar surface.

The authors suggest these features may be part of a jewellery assemblage like mounting the talons in a necklace or bracelet.

"The presence of the talons also indicates that the Neanderthals may have acquired eagle talons for some kind of symbolic purpose," said lead author David Frayer from the University of Kansas.

They also demonstrate that the Neanderthals may have made jewellery 80,000 years before the appearance of modern humans in Europe.

"It is really a stunning discovery. It is so startling because there is just nothing like it until very recent times to find this kind of jewellery," Frayer added.

Some archaeologists have contended that only homo sapiens had minds capable of such symbolic behaviour, expressed in cave art, jewellery and other artefacts with no obvious practical use.

The study was published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.