![]() So much so that they transported the birds back to Europe in the 1500s. Once Europeans hit the continent, they developed a taste for the bird pretty quick. Tribes used the turkey for more than just food they were also valued for their feathers which were used in ritual cloaks and burial practices, among other things.Īndy Reago & Chrissy McClarren/Wikimedia Commons One simply needed to walk off into the woods and hunt. ![]() In the eastern United States, domestication wasn’t really necessary due to their abundance in wild forested areas. Full-fledged domestication of wild turkeys first began in Mexico. Navajos in the American southwest were known to capture and pen wild turkeys and fatten up the birds for food. Aztecs honored the bird twice a year during religious festivals, believing the turkey a manifestation of Tezcatlipoca, a trickster god. A total of 11,116 fossil specimens from at least 791 individual turkeys had been found in the tar pits as of 2006.įrom those initial contacts by prehistoric hunters and continuing into modern times, the turkey has stayed an important cultural component throughout North America. Turkeys would get mired in the tar, making for easy pickings for the golden eagles, who upon swooping in for the kill would become trapped themselves. The tar pits were a real no-win situation for both predator and prey species that found their way into the sticky stuff. The California turkey left a lot of evidence of his passing at the La Brea tar pits, more than any species of bird other than the golden eagle. Paleoindians weren’t the only ones eating turkey for dinner though. The eastern turkey and oscillated turkeys were saved from this fate due to the environment they lived in, which contained heavier tree cover and a lot more water than the arid southwest. The Southwestern and California turkeys soon were soon extinct. The theory is that during a rather nasty dry spell about 11,500 years ago, the Southwest and California turkeys were forced to flock around ever increasingly shrinking water sources, which grouped them tightly together and left them extremely vulnerable to the nomadic hunter-gatherers who had recently crossed over from Asia. Both went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, likely because they were more susceptible to environmental change and human predation. The latter two species lived in what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and California. ![]() By the end of the Pleistocene there were four distinct species of turkey strutting around the countryside the eastern turkey, the oscillated Turkey, the southwestern turkey, and the California turkey. After some serious adaptation to living in North America, this proto-turkey evolved to what we would recognize as a Wild Turkey during the Pleistocene Epoch about 2.5 million years ago. The ancient ancestor of the Wild Turkey crossed the Bering land bridge millions of years ago. Plate 6 of Birds of America by John James Audubon ![]()
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