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The Golden Eagle has played a prominent part in the cultures and traditions of people across Eurasia and North America. The Neanderthals have for a long time been considered incapable of systematically catching birds of any description. Recent work has demonstrated that not only were they able to catch birds, they also took diurnal raptors. In this paper we show that Neanderthals selectively took the largest raptors at their disposal within Eurasia. Among these large raptors was the Golden Eagle, the most powerful and dominant of the raptors. Neanderthals and Golden Eagles co-shared the same habitats and landscapes across the Palaearctic region. We show that the long human/Golden Eagle association goes at least as far back as the Neanderthals.

Although hardly applied to human palaeoecology, bird fossils offer a unique opportunity for quantitative studies of the hominin habitat. Here we reconstruct the Homo habitat niche across a large area of the Palaearctic, based on a database of avian fauna for Pleistocene sites. Our results reveal a striking association between Homo and habitat mosaics. A mix of open savannah-type woodland, wetlands and rocky habitats emerges as the predominant combination occupied by Homo across a wide geographical area, from the earliest populations of the Lower Palaeolithic to the latest hunter-gatherer communities of the Upper Palaeolithic. This observation is in keeping with the view that such landscapes have had long standing selective value for hominins.

Using data collected from existing habitats found in the southwestern Iberian Peninsula, and including data collected in the Biological Reserve of the Parque Nacional de Donana, Spain, this study considers the seasonal and inter-annual variability of a thermo-Mediterranean, subhumid, environment and the significance of the presence of surface water in the system. This extant environment is then used together with the fossil record from Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar, where Neanderthals lived, as a proxy for the ecology of the emerged landscape outside the cave.