After research, 40 years ago, scientists found prehistoric egg residues in the sand dunes of southern Australia, showing signs of being boiled.
Protein extracted from prehistoric eggshell fragments found on beaches in Australia confirms that the prehistoric eggshell fragments belong to an eggbird about 2 meters tall that went extinct more than 47,000 years ago.
Burn marks found on fragments of ancient eggshells 40 years ago suggest that the large eggs of a long-extinct bird were cooked and eaten by the first of the earliest Australians, leading to a heated debate among modern scientists about the extinction of their species.
Some eggshells have evidence that they have been cooked and then discarded in and around the hearth.
Now, an international team led by scientists from the Universities of Cambridge and Turin has placed animals on an evolutionary tree by comparing the protein sequences of egg powder fossils to those encoded in the genomes of live poultry species.
"Time, temperature and the chemistry of fossils all determine how much information we can collect,"
Eggshells are made from mineral crystals that can only capture some protein.
Eggshells preserve this biological data in the harshest environments, possibly for millions of years.
The findings suggest that the source of the ancient egg was the prehistoric "Doomsday Devil Duck": a giant flightless bird with tiny wings and huge legs that roamed around prehistoric Australia, possibly in herds.
The "Doomsday Devil Duck", with its feathers and a giant bird that can't fly, belongs to the vegetarian sequence, is about 2 meters tall, weighs between 220-240 kilograms, and lays eggs the size of about 1.5 kilograms of melons, the size of cantaloupes. It is one of Australia's "megafauna". Disappearing thousands of years after human arrival suggests that humans played a role in its extinction.
However, fragments of eggshells with unique combustion patterns consistent with human activities have been found in different parts of the continent.
This means that the first humans did not necessarily hunt these giant birds, but often attacked their nests and stole their huge eggs for food.
While the Doomsday Devil Duck has been a contender for the mysterious egg layer, some scientists believe that a more likely candidate, due to the shape and thickness of the shell, is another extinct bird that is much smaller in size and weighs about 5-7 kilograms, similar to a large turkey.
But the "Doomsday Devil Duck" appeared before humans discovered the egg-shaped lineage, which ruled out other candidates.
The 50,000-year-old eggshells found at the archaeological site in Wood Point, Australia, have also been unearthed in hundreds of archaeological sites in Africa, dating back at least 100,000 years.
It is worth pondering that ostriches and humans coexisted throughout prehistory to the present, but they were not extinct. The extinction of the Doomsday Devil Duck proves that the early Australians exploited eggs to a greater extent than these extraordinary birds could tolerate.