Enlarge image
Forager, not food source: Chicken pecks grains
Photo: Catherine Falls Commercial/Getty Images
According to a study more than 3000 years ago, people in the area of today's Thailand were the first known chicken keepers.
As an international research team describes in the journals "Antiquity" and "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences", the birds only started relatively late on their way to becoming the numerically most widespread farm animal in the world.
According to data from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), around 33 billion chickens are being kept around the world in 2020 – alongside around one billion pigs and one and a half billion cattle.
The group led by Joris Peters, director of the Munich State Collection for Anthropology and Palaeoanatomy, believes that rice cultivation in Southeast Asia was the starting signal for the history of chickens as livestock.
The supply of food from agriculture has lured the wild red Bankiva chickens (Gallus gallus), which are native to the tropical jungles of the region, from the trees.
This is how a closer relationship between humans and chickens developed, from which today's domestic chicken developed.
Previously, it had been assumed, among other things, that chickens had been domesticated in China several thousand years earlier and that they were also used in Europe 7,000 years ago.
The new study challenges these hypotheses.
It shows for the first time "how wrong our idea was when and where chickens were first domesticated," said co-author Greger Larson of the University of Oxford.
Oldest finds in Thailand
The research team examined remains of chickens from more than 600 sites in 89 countries.
Among other things, the researchers examined the skeletons and the sites where they were found.
According to them, the oldest chicken bones were systematically dated for the first time using the radiocarbon method.
They also looked at pictorial representations and writings from the respective period in which poultry played a role.
Accordingly, the oldest bones that can be unequivocally assigned to domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticus) come from a site at Ban Non Wat in central Thailand.
They have been dated to between 1650 and 1250 BC - many thousands of years after cattle and pigs were kept as livestock.
Chickens later reached central China, southern Asia and Mesopotamia, the study authors said.
According to the study, they did not arrive in Europe until around 800 BC.
The researchers do not rule out the possibility that there could be even older finds in the future, which would point to an earlier connection between humans and chickens.
Adored, not consumed
The researchers assume that the first domestic chickens descended from the Burma Bankiva chicken (Gallus gallus spadiceus).
Among other things, the cultivation and storage of rice and millet could have led to the Bankiva chickens coming to human settlements - and staying there because of the food supply.
According to the study, the chickens were later transported first within Asia and then around the Mediterranean Sea on routes used by the early Greeks, Etruscans and Phoenicians.
The researchers emphasize that during the Iron Age in Europe, chickens were generally not considered food, but revered.
So chickens were buried intact, in some cases together with people.
Only later in the Roman Empire did it become more common to eat chickens and their eggs.
“Eating chicken is so common that many people assume it has always been eaten.
However, our results show that our early relationships with chickens were much more complex,” explained co-author Naomi Sykes from the University of Exeter.
ak/dpa