Was Prehistoric India ever home to African Ostriches?

What comes to your mind when you think of ostriches? Well, not India. In fact, India might be the last thing you associate with them. But what if we told you ostriches existed in India too? Though it was approximately 25,000 years ago, their history is a unique one when compared to India’s existing fauna.

A flock of ostriches; Image source: PTC news website

It was only in the year 2017 that the instances of ostrich eggshells being found in various parts of India started making it to the news headlines. This was not the first time that such remains were found in the country. Since 1847 traces of the existence of ostrich in the Indian subcontinent have been recorded time and again. But the DNA analysis of 2017 made it clear that these eggshells resembled the DNA of the African ostrich(Struthio Camelus) with a stunning similarity of 92 per cent. IIT Roorkee and the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology  jointly conducted these tests.

In 1847, Falconer was the first person to emphasize the fossils of ostrich found in northwest India. Soon more researchers followed him. The first ostrich eggshells in India were found near the Ken River, in Uttar Pradesh in 1880. But as discussed above, not much heed was paid to it until 1976. This was the year when a necklace made of ostrich egg shells was found around the neck of a skeleton in Bhimbetka (Upper Paleolithic period). Soon several places in and around Madhya Pradesh started sprouting into the picture. Patne (Madhya Pradesh), Jalgaon (Maharashtra) and Rajasthan were some of them where more egg shells were discovered.

Some scholars suggest the continental drifting of the Gondwanaland to be the cause behind this. They are of the opinion that African ostriches migrated across Eurasia to the Indian subcontinent some 20 million years ago when all these continents were interconnected. But this hypothesis is not yet proven scientifically.

With these finds another interesting aspect popped up. Several historians and observers started pointing to the Indian cave paintings which had an eerie resemblance to the ostriches. Earlier marked off as any ordinary bird species, they have now become the subject of debates. Marichataila rock shelters in Odisha are one such example. A huge bird, morphologically similar to an ostrich, is engraved at a place in the cave with four eggs. These are marked with motifs probably indicating fertility. Another one was found in the rock paintings of Vidarbha. However, both these are highly debated as the images appear quite distorted according to some experts and thus no conclusion could be drawn so far.

Though there has been significant progress in this field with the recent findings, more needs to be done in order to trace the exact location of the ostriches’ dwelling place in prehistoric India. The non-conclusive nature of the petroglyphs points to a need for conducting more research and studies in this regard. This would help in tracing the temporal and spatial extent of the ostriches’ presence as well as open a new realm for studying prehistoric India.

The study of pre-historic fauna is crucial to get a holistic picture of the time. Information like breeding centres, densely populated zones, migrating patterns, etc can help in discovering more about the anthropogenic aspects as well. Provided the ostriches dwelled on the subcontinent even before the coming of the hominins, this could be an important stepping stone for further discoveries still waiting to be explored.