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The real chicken mystery has nothing to do with whether the egg comes first. Scientists want to know when, where and how a woodland bird met with human farmers to finally begin the path to the Popeyes chicken sandwich.
The more bioarchaeologists and evolutionary biologists delve into the deep history of the chicken, the more complex its history and the harder it is to imagine a time when there was no food. Recently, however, scientists have discovered that descendants of the red woodland bird were first seen by humans as wonderful and exotic, then sometimes sacrificed to the ancient gods and sometimes revered as status symbols.
Details of when and where the chicken was domesticated were disputed. The resulting picture was probably one of early domestication in China, India or Southeast Asia 8,000 or more years ago. But a couple of supplementary articles published in the journals on Monday Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and ancient ages He presented an updated origin story that brings the emergence of the domestic chicken closer to 3500 years ago in what is now Thailand.
The reports also suggest a new hypothesis for how domestication occurred. The researchers argue that the first archaeological evidence of domestic chickens coincides with the emergence of rice and millet cultivation in dry areas that attracted forest birds, bringing them out of the forest and into regular contact with humans.
In combination, the reports put the case for a “comprehensive reassessment of chickens” and show “how inaccurate our understanding of the time and place of chicken domestication was”, said Greger Larson, a domestication and ancient DNA expert at the University of Oxford. who used to write for both newspapers.
In the report in Proceedings, researchers re-evaluated evidence from more than 600 sites in 89 countries and found the oldest domesticated chicken fossils at Ban Non Wat, a stone age site in central Thailand. The bones were about 3,500 years old.
The study also found that chickens spread west to Africa and then north to Europe with maritime traders from Southeast Asia. Previous estimates of chickens arriving in Europe 7,000 years ago did not hold. Instead, the researchers estimate that chickens first arrived in Southern Europe 2,800 years ago. It took hundreds of years to reach the more northern regions, and a full millennium to reach Scandinavia and Scotland.
The study “rewrites the origins and history of poultry farming”, said Joris Peters of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, author of the paper in Proceedings.
The ancient report was based on radiocarbon dating of 23 chicken bone samples from North Africa and Europe, most of which had been studied before. It showed that three-quarters of the fossils were incorrectly dated. In some cases, modern chicken remains (1950 or later) have been dated to the Iron Age, as in Morocco.
“We now have the clearest picture of our early interactions with chickens,” said Julia Best, one of the report’s authors, with radiocarbon dating rather than geological and archaeological methods.
Some patterns of how ancient people treated chickens became clear with the method. In England and European Iron Age sites, researchers have found adult chickens buried alone with no signs of butchery, one even with a healed leg fracture that suggested human care.
It seems that people began not by eating birds, but by admiring their charismatic and exotic existence. As the chicken spread around the world at an extraordinary rate, every human group seemed to treat it with respect.
“Chicken has been celebrated and revered for centuries,” said Naomi Sykes of the University of Exeter in England and the author of both papers. But then we started to eat them regularly.
Even when birds arrive in a new place, evidence has shown that it takes several hundred years of living with chickens to get to know them well enough to start eating regularly. When the Romans invaded Britain, they ate the birds while the Britons weren’t.
As we now know, familiarity eventually gave birth to McNuggets and a vast industry worldwide that manufactures. tens of billions of chickens for consumption. The business world also reacted animal welfare activists and removing the animal from the equation and directly lab-grown skinless, boneless protein sheets.
The papers provide “a really good analysis of all the data”, said Olivier Hanotte, an animal genomics expert at the University of Nottingham and the International Animal Research Institute in the UK. Recently Dr. Dr. Larson and others, who participated in the analysis of chicken ancestry but was not featured in either of the two recent papers. Hanotte said recent studies have shown that domestication of chickens is more recent and has spread very quickly. World. “So we shouldn’t really say that domestication is very ancient.”
However, he was not entirely convinced by the domestication hypothesis presented in the paper, which the authors acknowledged would require further research to confirm. He said that in many societies children keep wild animals as pets. He said this could be a precursor to domestication and would leave little trace.
Dr. Larson said the new hypothesis is valuable because ideas about domestication often center around human actions and intention. First, he said, researchers should look for a situation where animals gain some benefit from intercourse with humans.
The authors said the pattern of dry rice cultivation in Thailand 3,500 years ago with large fertile and fallow fields and border shrubs may have been a better niche for forest birds than the irrigated paddy common in other regions.
Dr. “And that starts the relationship,” Larson said.
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