STATE COLLEGE, PENNSYLVANIA—According to a Smithsonian Magazine report, a new study of scarlet macaw bones unearthed in New Mexico suggests the birds were bred in captivity and raised with a great deal of specialized care and effort at a single, small aviary in what is now the southwestern United States or northwestern Mexico by ancestral Pueblo peoples between A.D. 850 and 1150. Richard George of Penn State University and his team extracted mitochondrial DNA from the remains of 14 macaws recovered from five different sites in Chaco Canyon and the Mimbres region of New Mexico. They found that all 14 birds shared a similar heritage, and more than 70 percent of them likely shared a maternal lineage. “This is important… not only the population history of macaws and human interaction, but also what was happening between groups of people,” George explained. Images of macaw chicks on Mimbres pottery also support the idea that the fast-growing birds were raised locally. It had been previously suggested that macaws in North America had been imported from the Paquimé aviary in Mexico, which was most active between A.D. 1250 and 1450. Such a long journey from Mexico to Chaco Canyon would have taken more than a month. For more on evidence of macaws in the American Southwest, go to “Angry Birds.”
