It was their bond with rice crops that led chickens to become one of the most numerous animals in the world. Around 3,500 years ago in Southeast Asia, dried rice became an attractive lure for wild birds, who came down from the trees to eat and began to interact with people.
This is how, according to an international team of researchers in an article published in the journals Antiquity and Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the birds of the red jungle (Gallus gallus) were domesticated, the species that, with the passage of time, time, it ended up giving rise to modern roosters, hens and chickens.
Until now, researchers believed that these animals were domesticated between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago in India, China or Southeast Asia, and that chickens were already present in Europe more than 7,000 years ago. In the Iron Age, they were even revered and not used for food.
But experts from the universities of Exeter, Munich, Cardiff, Oxford, Bournemouth, Toulouse and centers and institutes in Germany, France and Argentina have discovered the association with rice farming. Still, the birds were initially considered exotic and were not used as a “food” source until several centuries later.
Once chickens were domesticated, in a process that began around 1500 BC in Southeast Asia, they began their expansion through Asia to the west and also changed the ways in which they were perceived in the different human societies of the past. last 3,500 years.
The researchers suggest that chickens were first transported across Asia and then across the Mediterranean along routes used by early Greek, Etruscan and Phoenician sea traders.
Previous studies have shown that several of Europe’s earliest chickens are buried alone and without slaughter. Many were also buried with people. Men were often buried with roosters and women with chickens.
It was not until the arrival of the Roman Empire that chickens and eggs began to become popular as forms of food. In Britain, for example, chickens were not regularly eaten until the third century AD, mainly in urban and military settings.
The team of experts reassessed chicken remains found at more than 600 sites in a total of 89 countries. They examined the skeletons, the burial location, and the historical records about the societies and cultures where they were found.
The oldest bones of a domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) were found at the Ban Non Wat Neolithic site in central Thailand and date to between 1650 and 1250 BC.
The team also used radiocarbon dating to age up to 23 of the earliest chickens found in western Eurasia and North Africa. Most of the bones were much younger than previously thought. These results dispel, according to specialists, the theory that chickens came to Europe before the first millennium BC. and indicate that they did not arrive until around 800 BC.
After reaching the Mediterranean region, it took nearly 1,000 more years for chickens to become established in the cooler climates of Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia and Iceland. “With their grain-based but highly adaptable diet, the sea routes played a particularly important role in the spread of chickens to Asia, Oceania, Africa and Europe,” explains Professor Joris Peters of the University of Munich.
“Eating chickens is so common that people think we have always eaten them. Our evidence shows that our past relationship with this species was much more complex and that for centuries they were celebrated and revered,” adds Professor Naomi Sykes, from the University of Exeter.
Dr Ophélie Lebrasseur, from the University of Toulouse, concludes that it is “surprising” that chickens “are so ubiquitous and popular today despite the fact that they have been domesticated relatively recently”.
