Where Did Chickens Come From? The Domestication of the Chicken

Consider this:  You’re an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, you want to let everybody know about your war exploits and plunder, and social media hasn’t been invented yet—what should you do?  Well, if you’re Thutmose III, the Napoleon of ancient Egypt, you inscribe all of your immodest assertions right onto one of the walls of the great Karnak temple for all people to see.   Fortunately for Thutmose III, inscribing information into stone has given it a bit more permanency than a blog entry or a Facebook post might have.  People have been looking at those inscriptions for over 3000 years, and the “Annals of Thutmose III” are still there on the ancient walls of the ruined Karnak temple in Luxor, Egypt for all to read. 

The Great Hall - Karnak (US Public Domain)

One interesting entry in the annals discusses bringing “the bird that gives birth every day” to Egypt from “the land between Syria and Shinar, Babylonia”.  This is the first known ancient Egyptian mention of the chicken, and from the description we can deduce that chickens were unknown in Egypt at that time and were just being brought into the kingdom from Mesopotamia.  The Sumerians, who lived in Mesopotamia from 5000 to 1500 BCE, apparently had chickens, so chickens came to Mesopotamia long before the Egyptians found them there and carried them to Egypt.  The Sumerians referred to chickens as “the king's birds”, an indication of their importance.  They were also called “the bird from Meluhha”, which could be a big hint as to where the Sumerians first came by them.  Nobody knows exactly where Meluhha was located, but it is generally assumed to be somewhere in the Indus valley – in present day India. 

It is by studying exactly this sort of ancient information that scientists have been able to track chickens as they moved from one civilization to another and eventually spread across the world.  And by tracking that progress backwards, essentially rewinding the tape of history, scientists can get a good handle on where chickens were first domesticated.  The earliest known chicken remains were found at the “Cishan site” in the Hebei province of northern China and have been dated to 5400 BCE—over 7000 years ago.  The problem with digging up old chicken bones is that there’s no way to know if those bones belonged to wild chickens that were hunted or if the chickens were truly domestic—and without a doubt wild chickens were hunted long before they were domesticated.  The only way to be sure the chicken bones at an archaeological site belonged to domestic chickens is to also find some sort of archaeological evidence of chicken enclosures or chicken keeping.  The earliest definitive evidence of domestic chickens has been dated to over 5500 years ago, also in China.  Archaeologists are also certain that there were domestic chickens in the Indus Valley around 2000 BCE.  Chickens moved from there to the Middle East, Egypt and Europe, and the rest, as they say, is prehistory. 

“OK,” you are no doubt saying, “Exactly when and where did a wild chicken become that first domestic chicken?”  “Good question!” I reply.  But actually, there probably wasn’t one specific event.  All evidence points toward multiple domestication events in a variety of locations in Asia where wild chickens lived, including China, Thailand, Vietnam, and India. 

Then you’re probably thinking, “But what exactly were these wild chickens, anyway?”  “Excellent question!” I exclaim.  There’s really nothing called “the wild chicken.”  But there was and still is the red junglefowl that lived, and still lives in southern China, India, Southeast Asia, and the islands of Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. These birds live on insects, seeds, and fruit.  They are essentially flightless, but do fly well enough to perch in the low branches of trees and other high places at night to escape predators.  The male of the species is slightly larger than the female and has red fleshy tissue hanging from his beak, called “wattles”.  Both males and females have fleshy red protuberances projecting from the tops of their heads called “combs”, but the male’s is larger.   During mating season, the male makes his presence known by calling “cock-a-doodle-doo”.  Does this bird sound like any other bird you know?  In fact, scientists recognize the red junglefowl as the direct ancestor of domestic chickens, with just a bit of grey junglefowl, a closely related species, thrown in.

Red Junglefowl Male (Jason Thompson - Flikr)

And that’s the story.  In the dim past of the Neolithic era, the history of some red junglefowl and humans became intertwined.  Those birds were contributors to the Neolithic Revolution that set us on the road to agriculture, metal tools, and the beginnings of technology.  That road has brought us to our modern age of KFC’s on practically every American street corner, and of some kind of chicken practically every day for practically everybody.  At one point in history, it was proclaimed that prosperity would be achieved when there was a chicken in every pot.  With 7 billion people on the planet, and 19 billion chickens…well, you do the math! 

Some people would say that today’s system of producing chicken meat and eggs has reached a pinnacle of productivity and efficiency.  Others would argue that huge buildings filled with tiny cages filled with chickens creates environmental and human health risks, and is unethical and inhumane.  And what do the chickens think?  Maybe at night, when all is quiet on the roosts and in all those tiny cages, they dream of running free through the Asian jungles.

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