House
Sparrows are closely associated with humans and are found in most parts of the
world. By investigating the DNA of several species of sparrows, researchers
have shown that the House Sparrow diverged from a sparrow in the Middle East –
and started to digest starch-rich foods – when humans developed agriculture
some 11,000 years ago.
The house
sparrow (Passer domesticus), is a
very familiar bird species. If you walk down the street of any major European
town or city, you will see them hopping back and forth, picking up scraps of
food and nesting in nearby buildings. They are also a common sight on farms and
in the countryside. Our connection with sparrows goes further – they are
mentioned in the Bible, in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare's
Hamlet.
How is it
that this small, charismatic bird has become so closely associated with us?
Researchers
at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) at the
University of Oslo (UiO) have been trying to answer this question by
investigating the DNA of populations of House Sparrows from across Europe and
the Middle East. Teaming up with colleagues from Iran and Kazakhstan, they also
investigated the Bactrianus sparrow, a subspecies found only in these regions.
The
Bactrianus sparrow looks like a House Sparrow, but is wild, avoids human
contact and feeds on a very different diet. By comparing the DNA of the two
sparrows, the team hoped to gain some insight into why one evolved to be closely
associated with people while the other did not.
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