![]() It seems like the widespread adoption of chicken meat as a human food probably followed naturally from that industry. So even if cultures didn’t actively revere them, it would have been understandable for them to see them as exotic and cute and cool to keep around.ĭuring the rise of the Roman Empire, we know that eggs became an extremely popular snack. The researchers argue that these domesticated jungle fowl would have been some of the most colorful and friendly birds folks had ever encountered, making them sort of like pet parrots. One grave chicken even showed evidence of a healed leg fracture, suggesting someone cared for it lovingly during its life. And in Europe, several of the earliest chickens, from around 50 BC to 100 AD, were buried alone or in human graves and show no signs of having been butchered. In early Southeast Asian sites, partial or whole skeletons of adult chickens were found placed in human graves. And according to the new study, as domesticated fowl spread across Asia and then throughout the Mediterranean along routes used by early Greek, Etruscan and Phoenician maritime traders, there was a clear pattern of the birds arriving several centuries before people started eating them. In addition to finding that a lot of bones were younger than previously thought, the researchers also showed that those 10,000 year old cock fighting bones were actually from pheasants.Īccording to the new analysis, the oldest bones of a definite domestic chicken were found in central Thailand and dated to between 1650 BC and 1250 BC.īased on the timing, which coincides with the rise of rice and millet cultivation in dry fields in that region, the researchers think domestication could have started when a few jungle fowl were tempted down from the trees and into human settlements by the abundance of free grain-sort of like the way the most docile wolves started hanging around human campfires.īut we know based on the archaeological evidence that people didn’t start eating chickens for meat for hundreds of years. They used radiocarbon dating to confirm the ages of 23 of the proposed earliest chickens found in western Eurasia and north-west Africa. The oldest signs of chicken bones that people had slaughtered and snacked on came from the ancient city of Maresha, which is in the Judean Lowlands and sat at the crossroads of trade routes for Egypt and Jerusalem during the Iron Age, peaking between 400 and 200 BC.īut in 2022, an international group of researchers called foul. There wasn’t any evidence of butchering that long ago, though, so some suggested the birds were bred for cockfighting, not for eating. Until recently, it was fairly widely accepted that people were breeding jungle fowl in Asia as far back as 10,000 years ago. It turns out that the origin of domesticated chickens is hotly contested. But in an effort to not just crib this one fantastic piece of reporting, I decided I’d pull a few random facts from farther back in chicken history. This fact started with an article called “How a shipping error 100 years ago launched the $30 billion chicken industry” by Kenny Torrella at Vox, which is as wild and interesting as it sounds. FACT: Before humans ate chickens, we treasured them as exotic pets If you like the stories in this post, we guarantee you’ll love the show. ![]() It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and Wikipedia spirals the editors of Popular Science can muster. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. ![]() ![]() What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast.
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