Throughout time, numerous studies and theories about when the domestication of chickens first occurred. But in a recent study, experts have finally pinpointed the date when humans first domesticated fowls.
Domesticated Fowls: The Origin of Chickens
Scientists have long debated the origins of chickens. Southeast Asia, Northern China, and India have all been proposed as the origin of domestic fowls, with chickens first appearing roughly 4,000 to 10,500 years in the past.
Researchers have precisely pinpointed the origins of the domestic fowls in two new studies. The first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled "The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens," found that chicken domestication first began in rice fields planted by farmers from Southeast Asia 3,500 years in the past. Soon after, these birds moved westward, where they were treated as culturally6 revered animals and not as the food source they are today.
The second study published in the journal Antiquity, titled "Redefining the timing and circumstances of the chicken's introduction to Europe and north-west Africa," suggests that domesticated fowls arrived in Mediterranean Europe roughly 2,800 years in the past and later appeared in Africa approximately 1,100 to 800 years ago.
A previous study in 2020 confirmed that the ancestors of the chickens we know today are a subspecies of a jungle fowl known as Gallus gallus spaedicus, narrowing the area of domestication for these fowls to Southeast Asia. The PNAS study shows that after humans began to plant rice within the range of the red jungle fowl, a tropical bird of the pheasant family. Charles Darwin, the famed biologist, first proposed that chickens may have descended from this subspecies due to their similarities in appearance.
Living Chickens and Their Ancestors
Unfortunately, living chickens could not be used as an accurate basis for narrowing the time window for their predecessor's domestication because the paleontology-based DNA sequencing used to date modern chickens only appeared in the domestic fowl in the last millennia.
Hence, researchers reevaluate the dates and records of chicken bones from roughly 600 archeological sites across the globe. The earliest remains came from Ban Non-Wat, Central Thailand, a dry rice farming site known to researchers as inhabited since the Neolithic Age. the earliest remains of chicken date between 1650 BCE and 1250 BCE, in the Bronze Age. Instead of flooded paddies, the field was soaked by seasonal rains, which attracted hungry wild fowls.
In the Antiquity study, radiocarbon dating found that 23 chicken bone samples gathered from 16 sites in Africa and Eurasia were younger compared to other samples by thousands of years than previously believed. Chicke3n remains found in a site in Etruscan were dated to 2,800 years ago and are believed to be when chickens first entered Europe, reports the Smithsonian Magazine.
Archaeologists found people buried with remnants of early chickens rather than discarded as scrap, which shows a clear domestic relationship. Because the birds were buried together with humans, it suggests that these birds had cultural or social significance and weren't viewed as a food source; hence desire for the fowl's meat is not the driver of its domestication.
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