The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens

Abstract

Though chickens are the most numerous and ubiquitous domestic bird, their origins, the circumstances of their initial association with people, and the routes along which they dispersed across the world remain controversial. In order to establish a robust spatial and temporal framework for their origins and dispersal, we assessed archaeological occurrences and the domestic status of chickens from ∼600 sites in 89 countries by combining zoogeographic, morphological, osteometric, stratigraphic, contextual, iconographic, and textual data. Our results suggest that the first unambiguous domestic chicken bones are found at Neolithic Ban Non Wat in central Thailand dated to ∼1650 to 1250 BCE, and that chickens were not domesticated in the Indian Subcontinent. Chickens did not arrive in Central China, South Asia, or Mesopotamia until the late second millennium BCE, and in Ethiopia and Mediterranean Europe by ∼800 BCE. To investigate the circumstances of their initial domestication, we correlated the temporal spread of rice and millet cultivation with the first appearance of chickens within the range of red junglefowl species. Our results suggest that agricultural practices focused on the production and storage of cereal staples served to draw arboreal red junglefowl into the human niche. Thus, the arrival of rice agriculture may have first facilitated the initiation of the chicken domestication process, and then, following their integration within human communities, allowed for their dispersal across the globe.

Keywords: chickens; dispersal; domestication; human niche.

Fig. 1.

A map depicting the distribution of both the gray and Ceylon junglefowl species and three subspecies of red junglefowl: G. gallus murghi, G. gallus spadiceus, and G. gallus jabouillei. The distribution of G. gallus gallus is depicted as the remainder of mainland southeast Asia and Sumatra following the general distribution in ref. . The G. gallus murghi distribution follows that of SI Appendix, Fig. S1, which draws on published maps in ornithological sources and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) records (–121). For G. gallus spadiceus and G. gallus jabouillei, the GBIF records were augmented by specimens with genetic data reported by refs. and .

Fig. 2.

A map depicting the earliest confidently assigned chicken remains across Eurasia, Africa, and Oceania alongside a spatial kriging interpolation of the timing of the arrival of chickens. The inference was performed using 100 independent, confidently assigned, and dated chicken remains listed in SI Appendix, Table S2. Each data point was placed on a spatial grid with resolution 10 min of a degree. Solid dots represent samples used in the spatial kriging, and hollow dots represent additional sample locations not incorporated into the interpolation. The colored shading indicates the inferred age for the introduction of chickens across the map. Gray areas indicate locations with a SE above the maximum threshold (see SI Appendix for a full description of the methods used to produce the map).

Fig. 3.

A map depicting the distribution of dated archaeological rice finds taken from the revised Rice Archaeological Database compiled by D.Q.F. and colleagues, RAD 2.0 (90), with newly added archaeological records and cleaned reports with associated dates that appear too early based on current understanding of archaeological chronology. This is especially the case in mainland Southeast Asia where most of the arrival of cereal agriculture is now thought to be ∼2500 BC for northern Vietnam and southernmost China only and ∼2000 BC for the rest of the region (94, 123).