The discovery of a 41,000-year-old ostrich nest by a team of archaeologists in Prakasam, Andhra Pradesh could provide key information about the extinction of megafauna in the Indian subcontinent. Here is all you need to know. What was discovered? A team of archaeologists, including Devara Anil Kumar, assistant professor at MS University, Vadodara, unearthed the world’s oldest known ostrich nest, while investigating the Prakasam site for fossils. The nest has a width of 9-10 feet, and was once home to 9-11 eggs, although it was capable of holding 30-40 eggs at a time, the researchers said. They pointed out that this discovery gave crucial insights about the extinction of megafauna in India. What are megafauna? While scientific literature disagrees about what constitutes megafauna, the term is generally used to describe animals weighing more than 50 kg. The term was first used by the English naturalist and explorer Alfred Russel Wallace in his 1876 book, The Geographical Distribution of Animals. Megafauna may be classified based on their dietary type as megaherbivores (plant-eaters), megacarnivores (meat-eaters), and megaomnivores (who eat both plants and meat). Ostriches are megaomnivores, with an adult ostrich weighing anywhere between 90 and 140 kg, with height between seven and nine feet. What does the Andhra discovery tell us about prehistoric megafauna? The discovery in Andhra proves the presence of ostriches in southern India 41,000 years ago. It also adds to the growing body of research examining why megafauna went extinct in India. The earliest documented evidence of the species in the subcontinent was presented by Richard Lydekker in 1884 in the Dhok Pathan deposits in Upper Siwalik (Sivalik) Hills in present-day Pakistan. He identified this as the extinct Struthio asiaticus or the Asian ostrich, a species named in 1871 by Richard Milne-Edwards. Archaeologist S A Sali in 1989 reported the discovery of ostrich eggshell beads and engraved pieces (dating back to roughly 50,000–40,000 years ago) in an Upper Palaeolithic open-air camping site at Patne, Maharashtra. In 2017, researchers at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad assessed the ages of a batch of fossilised egg shells from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, and established the presence of ostriches 25,000 years ago. The researchers attributed their presence in India to bio-geographical dispersion resulting from the continental drifting of Gondwanaland, the supercontinent which split up to form the seven continents we know today. A formal attempt at compiling a database of fossils from 25 sites in India was reported in a 2020 study involving researchers from Yale University and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The study, titled ‘Late Quaternary extinctions in the Indian Subcontinent,’ established that the disappearance of large animals here began some 30,000 years ago, coinciding with the arrival of humans. The study also gives support to the “co-evolution hypothesis” which states that fauna and their resilience to large-scale extinction may have resulted from coevolution with hominins — humans and their relatives. It posits that geographic isolation and abiotic factors may have fast-tracked their extinction. There is a general consensus on the need for robust datasets to establish a better understanding of the extinction of megafauna in the subcontinent.
