CHICKEN AND RICE MAIN DISH IN ASIA
Which came first, the chicken or the rice? New research suggests riceThe cliché about oysters is that it was a brave soul who first ate one, and maybe so (no matter if it was Jonathan Swift or Benjamin Franklin who first said it), but it was a braver one still who first ate a chicken.
Joseph Brean -National Post
Which came first, the chicken or the rice? New research suggests rice
That’s one curious suggestion in a pair of new scholarly research papers about the origin of the domesticated chicken, based on radiocarbon dating and hundreds of archeological digs worldwide, published Monday in Antiquity and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It was brave to kill a chicken in Iron Age Europe, even as late as the time of Homer in the 800s BC, because chickens were more like pets, exotica that were too rare or important to be slaughtered for meat, this research concludes. Chickens had become almost venerated since they were lured down from trees by southeast Asian rice farmers, spreading through trade to the Mediterranean and Africa. Eat a chicken in Iron Age Europe, and you risked the anger of some prehistoric Joe Exotic who had been feeding it, maybe even named it.
But the reward was high, two main sections of different but equally tasty meat, light and dark, delicate and robust, plus other bits like liver, heart, feet, brain and a thin skin that roasts into candy.
The scientists from British and European universities report that the domestication of chickens took place in southeast Asia and coincided with rice cultivation, but not for the obvious reason, that they make a meal.
Rather, the reclamation of land for rice growing, with its slash and burn agricultural cycle, “may have attracted red junglefowl to human settlements and their immediate catchment,” the PNAS paper suggests . They call this the “Chicken-Rice Dispersal” theory.
From there, chickens were spread by humans to central China and Mesopotamia no earlier than the late-second millennium BC, and Mediterranean Europe and Ethiopia by the first. Previous theories about a more ancient origin in the Indus Valley or northeast China are not backed by these new findings.
So, before it became a near-universal meat option and the most numerous and widely distributed domestic animal on Earth, chicken was an exotic curiosity, and prized as such. Remains of Gallus gallus domesticus are found unbutchered and uneaten in prehistoric tombs from Thailand, dated as far back as 1650 BC, to Italy, perhaps 700 years later. In several places across Europe, chickens appear individually buried, often as older animals. One hen found on Weston Down in England had a healed leg fracture, suggesting care. In England as in other places, chickens seem to have been kept for 800 years before people started eating them, encouraged it seems by Roman practices.
It really caught on. Today, a chicken in every pot is a mark of healthy civilization. It is as the late British restaurant critic AA Gill once wrote in a 2016 report from the refugee camp at Calais, France, at the peak of broader European migrant crisis, which he found was “beginning to become a place, with churches and theatres and art and restaurants. It is germinating into that collective home. But then, isn’t this how all places once began? With refugees stopping at a river, a beach, a crossroads and saying, we’ll just pause here for a bit. Put on the kettle, kill a chicken.”
Turns out, though, killing chickens as a mark of domesticity is a relatively new development in human culture, at least compared to what anthropologists used to think. Most curiously, the original purpose for their domestication does not seem to be for food.
The Antiquity paper reports on radiocarbon dating of 23 chicken bones at 16 different Bronze and Iron Age sites in Europe, Britain and North Africa, as far east as Turkey, as far north as Scotland, as far south and west as Morocco. It showed modern chickens grow much faster and have larger bones in every dimension. Most were far younger than their stratigraphic context suggested, some just a few hundred years old. Others were legitimately ancient, like a chicken bone from Stonehenge from about the late-fifth century BC. Two Italian chicken bones were older still. But none dated further back than the first millennium BC.
Like the PNAS paper, it places chicken domestication later than previously thought, and notes a “consistent time-lag” between when chickens arrived and when people started eating them, suggesting a sort of veneration.
Early Greek, Etruscan or Phoenician sailors probably brought chickens into Europe, first into Italy, where the earliest identified chicken is from a ninth or tenth century BC tomb. It took another thousand years for chickens to reach the colder regions of Scotland and Scandinavia.
The chicken crossed many roads before it became the safe option on so many menus, suffering as a result, so much so that a popular National Post feature once ran under the headline, “Death to the chicken finger.”
Chickens don’t have fingers. They do, however, have oysters, two little nuggets tucked into the back at the top of the thighs. It was a plucky soul who first ate one, as this research suggests, but in the long run it paid off.
That’s one curious suggestion in a pair of new scholarly research papers about the origin of the domesticated chicken, based on radiocarbon dating and hundreds of archeological digs worldwide, published Monday in Antiquity and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It was brave to kill a chicken in Iron Age Europe, even as late as the time of Homer in the 800s BC, because chickens were more like pets, exotica that were too rare or important to be slaughtered for meat, this research concludes. Chickens had become almost venerated since they were lured down from trees by southeast Asian rice farmers, spreading through trade to the Mediterranean and Africa. Eat a chicken in Iron Age Europe, and you risked the anger of some prehistoric Joe Exotic who had been feeding it, maybe even named it.
But the reward was high, two main sections of different but equally tasty meat, light and dark, delicate and robust, plus other bits like liver, heart, feet, brain and a thin skin that roasts into candy.
The scientists from British and European universities report that the domestication of chickens took place in southeast Asia and coincided with rice cultivation, but not for the obvious reason, that they make a meal.
Rather, the reclamation of land for rice growing, with its slash and burn agricultural cycle, “may have attracted red junglefowl to human settlements and their immediate catchment,” the PNAS paper suggests . They call this the “Chicken-Rice Dispersal” theory.
From there, chickens were spread by humans to central China and Mesopotamia no earlier than the late-second millennium BC, and Mediterranean Europe and Ethiopia by the first. Previous theories about a more ancient origin in the Indus Valley or northeast China are not backed by these new findings.
So, before it became a near-universal meat option and the most numerous and widely distributed domestic animal on Earth, chicken was an exotic curiosity, and prized as such. Remains of Gallus gallus domesticus are found unbutchered and uneaten in prehistoric tombs from Thailand, dated as far back as 1650 BC, to Italy, perhaps 700 years later. In several places across Europe, chickens appear individually buried, often as older animals. One hen found on Weston Down in England had a healed leg fracture, suggesting care. In England as in other places, chickens seem to have been kept for 800 years before people started eating them, encouraged it seems by Roman practices.
It really caught on. Today, a chicken in every pot is a mark of healthy civilization. It is as the late British restaurant critic AA Gill once wrote in a 2016 report from the refugee camp at Calais, France, at the peak of broader European migrant crisis, which he found was “beginning to become a place, with churches and theatres and art and restaurants. It is germinating into that collective home. But then, isn’t this how all places once began? With refugees stopping at a river, a beach, a crossroads and saying, we’ll just pause here for a bit. Put on the kettle, kill a chicken.”
Turns out, though, killing chickens as a mark of domesticity is a relatively new development in human culture, at least compared to what anthropologists used to think. Most curiously, the original purpose for their domestication does not seem to be for food.
The Antiquity paper reports on radiocarbon dating of 23 chicken bones at 16 different Bronze and Iron Age sites in Europe, Britain and North Africa, as far east as Turkey, as far north as Scotland, as far south and west as Morocco. It showed modern chickens grow much faster and have larger bones in every dimension. Most were far younger than their stratigraphic context suggested, some just a few hundred years old. Others were legitimately ancient, like a chicken bone from Stonehenge from about the late-fifth century BC. Two Italian chicken bones were older still. But none dated further back than the first millennium BC.
Like the PNAS paper, it places chicken domestication later than previously thought, and notes a “consistent time-lag” between when chickens arrived and when people started eating them, suggesting a sort of veneration.
Early Greek, Etruscan or Phoenician sailors probably brought chickens into Europe, first into Italy, where the earliest identified chicken is from a ninth or tenth century BC tomb. It took another thousand years for chickens to reach the colder regions of Scotland and Scandinavia.
The chicken crossed many roads before it became the safe option on so many menus, suffering as a result, so much so that a popular National Post feature once ran under the headline, “Death to the chicken finger.”
Chickens don’t have fingers. They do, however, have oysters, two little nuggets tucked into the back at the top of the thighs. It was a plucky soul who first ate one, as this research suggests, but in the long run it paid off.
Two studies lay out how the birds went from wild fowl in Southeast Asia to the dinner plate
Modern chickens originated around 3,500 years ago in Southeast Asia, later than previously thought, scientists say. Rice cultivation apparently spurred the transformation of wild fowl into a global menu item.
By Bruce Bower
It turns out that chicken and rice may have always gone together, from the birds’ initial domestication to tonight’s dinner.
In two new studies, scientists lay out a potential story of chicken’s origins. This poultry tale begins surprisingly recently in rice fields planted by Southeast Asian farmers around 3,500 years ago, zooarchaeologist Joris Peters and colleagues report. From there, the birds were transported westward not as food but as exotic or culturally revered creatures, the team suggests June 6 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Cereal cultivation may have acted as a catalyst for chicken domestication,” says Peters, of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
The domesticated fowl then arrived in Mediterranean Europe no earlier than around 2,800 years ago, archaeologist Julia Best of Cardiff University in Wales and colleagues report June 6 in Antiquity. The birds appeared in northwest Africa between 1,100 and 800 years ago, the team says.
Researchers have debated where and when chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) originated for more than 50 years. India’s Indus Valley, northern China and Southeast Asia have all been touted as domestication centers. Proposed dates for chickens’ first appearance have mostly ranged from around 4,000 to 10,500 years ago. A 2020 genetic study of modern chickens suggested that domestication occurred among Southeast Asian red jungle fowl. But DNA analyses, increasingly used to study animal domestication, couldn’t specify when domesticated chickens first appeared (SN: 7/6/17).
Using chicken remains previously excavated at more than 600 sites in 89 countries, Peters’ group determined whether the chicken bones had been found where they were originally buried by soil or, instead, had moved downward into older sediment over time and thus were younger than previously assumed.
After establishing the timing of chickens’ appearances at various sites, the researchers used historical references to chickens and data on subsistence strategies in each society to develop a scenario of the animals’ domestication and spread.
The new story begins in Southeast Asian rice fields. The earliest known chicken remains come from Ban Non Wat, a dry rice–farming site in central Thailand that roughly dates to between 1650 B.C. and 1250 B.C. Dry rice farmers plant the crop on upland soil soaked by seasonal rains rather than in flooded fields or paddies. That would have made rice grains at Ban Non Wat fair game for avian ancestors of chickens.
These fields attracted hungry wild birds called red jungle fowl. Red jungle fowl increasingly fed on rice grains, and probably grains of another cereal crop called millet, grown by regional farmers, Peters’ group speculates. A cultivated familiarity with people launched chicken domestication by around 3,500 years ago, the researchers say.
Chickens did not arrive in central China, South Asia or Mesopotamian society in what’s now Iran and Iraq until nearly 3,000 years ago, the team estimates.
Peters and colleagues have for the first time assembled available evidence “into a fully coherent and plausible explanation of not only where and when, but also how and why chicken domestication happened,” says archaeologist Keith Dobney of the University of Sydney who did not participate in the new research.
But the new insights into chickens don’t end there. Using radiocarbon dating, Best’s group determined that 23 chicken bones from 16 sites in Eurasia and Africa were generally younger, in some cases by several thousand years, than previously thought. These bones had apparently settled into lower sediment layers over time, where they were found with items made by earlier human cultures.
A researcher points to chicken bones from England that are more than 2,000 years old (middle), which lie between bones of larger modern chickens.
JONATHAN REES AND CARDIFF UNIVERSITY
Archaeological evidence indicates that chickens and rice cultivation spread across Asia and Africa in tandem, Peters’ group says. But rather than eating early chickens, people may have viewed them as special or sacred creatures. At Ban Non Wat and other early Southeast Asian sites, partial or whole skeletons of adult chickens were placed in human graves. That behavior suggests chickens enjoyed some sort of social or cultural significance, Peters says.
In Europe, several of the earliest chickens were buried alone or in human graves and show no signs of having been butchered.
The expansion of the Roman Empire around 2,000 years ago prompted more widespread consumption of chicken and eggs, Best and colleagues say. In England, chickens were not eaten regularly until around 1,700 years ago, primarily at Roman-influenced urban and military sites. Overall, about 700 to 800 years elapsed between the introduction of chickens in England and their acceptance as food, the researchers conclude. Similar lag times may have occurred at other sites where the birds were introduced.
CITATIONS
J. Peters et al. The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published June 6, 2022. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2121978119.
J. Best et al. Redefining the timing and circumstances of the chicken’s introduction to Europe and north-west Africa. Antiquity. Published June 6, 2022. doi: 10.15184/aqy.2021.90.
M.-S. Wang et al. 863 genomes reveal the origin and domestication of chicken. Cell Research. Vol. 30, June 25, 2020, p. 693. doi: 10.1038/s41422-020-0349-y.
Archaeological evidence indicates that chickens and rice cultivation spread across Asia and Africa in tandem, Peters’ group says. But rather than eating early chickens, people may have viewed them as special or sacred creatures. At Ban Non Wat and other early Southeast Asian sites, partial or whole skeletons of adult chickens were placed in human graves. That behavior suggests chickens enjoyed some sort of social or cultural significance, Peters says.
In Europe, several of the earliest chickens were buried alone or in human graves and show no signs of having been butchered.
The expansion of the Roman Empire around 2,000 years ago prompted more widespread consumption of chicken and eggs, Best and colleagues say. In England, chickens were not eaten regularly until around 1,700 years ago, primarily at Roman-influenced urban and military sites. Overall, about 700 to 800 years elapsed between the introduction of chickens in England and their acceptance as food, the researchers conclude. Similar lag times may have occurred at other sites where the birds were introduced.
CITATIONS
J. Peters et al. The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published June 6, 2022. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2121978119.
J. Best et al. Redefining the timing and circumstances of the chicken’s introduction to Europe and north-west Africa. Antiquity. Published June 6, 2022. doi: 10.15184/aqy.2021.90.
M.-S. Wang et al. 863 genomes reveal the origin and domestication of chicken. Cell Research. Vol. 30, June 25, 2020, p. 693. doi: 10.1038/s41422-020-0349-y.
About Bruce BowerE-mail
Bruce Bower has written about the behavioral sciences for Science News since 1984. He writes about psychology, anthropology, archaeology and mental health issues.
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