Page 4 - NPN November22

More veneration than consumption
DEBATING what comes first, the chicken or the egg, quickly results in a circular argument.
a timeframe, for the entire process, which is that peo- ple with dry-rice agricul- ture, who are not relying on wet-rice agriculture, which is quite different, but the ecological footprint of dry rice serves as a magnet to attract red junglefowl, who were in that area, into the human sights.
pointed out by Naomi Sykes who looked at that data very carefully, espe- cially in Western Europe, and what she recognised was the very first chick- ens that came in, when we radiocarbon dated them, these are not individual bones – the first chickens are complete skeletons, whole chickens, and of- ten aged four, five and six years old.
Cant
Comment
by BRENDON CANT
In other words, one that has no beginning or an end for that matter.
Though not as univer- sally debated, the origin of chickens has stretched the minds of many.
That kickstarts a rela- tionship whereby the chick- ens become very much a part of those human com- munities, which then start moving with that dry-rice agriculture through east Asia, then into south Asia and then much further west into the Levant – or east- ern Mediterranean region of western Asia – and into Europe.
However, it now seems that extremely clever sci- ence – courtesy of Greger Larson, Professor of Evo- lutionary Genomics at Oxford University in the UK – has drawn acceptable conclusions about their ori- gins, plus some interesting asides along the way.
chickens are not only ubiq- uitous, but are the world’s number one meat source also.
with 78-year-old Robyn Williams, the host of The Science Show on ABC Ra- dio National for almost 50 years.
So, these are birds that have been around for a long time that people are not eating.
With almost 10 chickens for each person on earth,
So, the question Prof Lar- son set out to answer was how and when did chickens become so much a part of our diet?
Here are some edited extracts from their chook chat, with Prof Larson’s re- sponses detailed.
And then what happens is that over about a 500-year time period, you start to see that first they are bur- ied by themselves, then they’re buried with people as grave goods.
By dating bones from 600 sites across 90 coun- tries, he charted the his- tory of chickens, how they became part of the agricul- tural scene and how they became domesticated.
Until we started this pro- ject about 10 years ago, there’d been a lot of guess- es and hypotheses about the origins of chickens, but the locations in terms of geography, the timeframe for that relationship be- tween people and chickens has been all over the shop and nobody has really had any clue about it.
We can time that whole thing by looking at the first appearance of the chicken remains and the spread of that dry-rice agriculture.
And even more than that, it looks like people weren’ t just being buried with chickens, they’re being buried with their chickens.
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Jungle fowl types gradually evolved and moved westward from Asia into Europe, eventually morphing into mainstream meat diets.
It seems they appeared about 3500 years ago, when humans began dry- rice farming in Southeast Asia.
When you get rid of the noise of spurious claims for early chickens and di- rectly radiocarbon date your bones, look at cut marks and the number, look at how many are juve- niles, look at eggshells and a range of other things, you see a stepping-stone model of the first dates further west are much more recent than the dates further east.
And so, there was a very close relationship, it was more about veneration than it was about con- sumption.
Chickens were at first revered, with about 500 years passing before they became a part of the hu- man diet.
Joris Peters and I start- ed this idea where he re- evaluated more than 600 sites across 90 different countries, looking specifi- cally at chicken remains and putting them through a whole litmus test to say how much confidence do we have that this really is a chicken?
Then, after about 500 years, you start to find bones in the archaeologi- cal record that are still chicken but now individ- ual bones, they’ve got cut marks on them and people are starting to consume them.
This time lag of several centuries between their in- troduction to new regions and then becoming a food source is consistent in dif- ferent regions.
The other amazing thing about it, and this was
Page 4 – National Poultry Newspaper, November 2022
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Well-dated evidence for Britain and mainland Europe suggests chickens were initially considered exotica and buried as in- dividuals, were gradually incorporated into human funerary rites and much later came to be seen as only food.
How confident are we that this date that’ s been claimed really is this date?
His findings and views were recently entertain-
And then we put all that together on a map, and we came up with a scenario where it looks as though, far from 5000 or 10,000 years ago, which has been claimed for the process of chicken domestication get- ting started, it looks like it’s only about 3500 years.
What’s really great about it is that we were able to see a very close correla- tion between the arrival of dry-rice agriculture in peninsula Southeast Asia with the first appearance of chicken remains within a human context as part of an agricultural setting.
So, it looks like we have a mechanism now, as well as
Chicken and rice have long been closely connected.