No, they did not. The paper never says humans domesticated cassowaries. What the researchers did was devise a method to examine eggshell deposit microstructure which is used to find out which hatching stage it is (thereby opening up the potential to answer questions about the relationship between earlier humans and birds). The researchers then applied it to deposits of cassowary eggs and found that humans specifically targeted late stage eggs, and they found evidence that some of the eggs actually hatched. Combined with the fact that rearing cassowary chicks is still done today they speculate that late Pleistocene/Early Holocene people already reared cassowary chicks up to "harvest age".
It would represent the earliest evidence of people rearing birds, but it is not domestication.
I opened the thread just to say the same thing!
The actual paper is here, for others:
Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene sites in the montane forests of New Guinea yield early record of cassowary hunting and egg harvesting
Any popular science article needs to be interpreted carefully, and really the original scientific paper always needs to be read because the authors of popular articles generally don't actually understand what they are writing about, and more often than not whatever article you are reading is based on another article which is based on another article. In this case the article is based off a New York Times article (here, but you need a subscription so I don't know what it says beyond the first few lines:
The World’s Deadliest Bird Was Raised by People 18,000 Years Ago).
Unfortunately, in the case of this subject, the heavy leaning into the "domestication" angle seems to be because the scientific paper itself included a sentence which reads "Although there is some evidence of a commensal relationship between early humans and rock doves possibly as early as 67 ka B.P. in Gibraltar, the data presented here may represent the earliest indication of human management of the breeding of an avian taxon anywhere in the world, preceding the early domestication of chicken (
Gallus gallus) and geese (
Anser anser) by several millennia".
This is a really strange inclusion because even from their own data there is nothing in the findings to indicate "management of the breeding" of cassowaries - the eggs were simply being collected from wild birds - let alone anything which should be connected to domestication of chickens or geese. One of the authors has also been making press statements, mentioned in the popular articles, directly comparing it to domestication.
Regarding the popular article I also found this sentence really weird: "Ancient humans would have needed to know exactly where the large birds were nesting, which indicates early humans were more capable of sophisticated intelligence than previously thought, per the
New York Times." The time period was only 6000 to 18,000 years ago!
