New study: Greeks brought chickens to Europe – When they were domesticated

A new international scientific study sheds more light on the conditions and timing of domestication of chickens, showing that their spread from Asia to Europe – through Greece – was more recent than previously thought. Chickens are estimated to have arrived in the Mediterranean around 800 BC.that is, towards the end of the Homeric Age.

Previous studies have claimed that chickens were first domesticated about 10,000 years ago in China, Southeast Asia or India and that they appeared in Europe about 7,000 years ago. New research by scientists from many countries (Britain, France, Germany, Argentina), who published two related articles in the journal National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and the journal Antiquity, concluded that the previous estimate for such old domestication and spread is wrong.

The new study evaluated chicken carcasses from more than 600 sites in 89 countries, examining animal skeletons, tomb finds and historical records. The earliest confirmed domesticated chicken bones were found at the Ban Nong Wat Neolithic site in central Thailand and date between 1650 and 1250 BC.

The dating with the method of radioactive carbon of 23 chickens found in western Eurasia and northwestern Africa showed that these are much more recent than previously thought. This discovery refutes the claim that there were chickens in Europe before 1000 BC. and leads to the new estimate that they probably did not reach our continent before 800 BC, originally in the Mediterranean.

The study estimates that the process of domestication was already underway around 1500 BC. in Southeast Asia and then the chickens were first transported to the rest of Asia and then to the Mediterranean by Greek, Etruscan and Phoenician maritime traders. From the Mediterranean it was a matter of time before they spread to Europe. It then took almost 1,000 years for the chickens to reach and acclimatize to the colder climates of Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia and Iceland.

The driving force behind the domestication of chickens is estimated to have been the emergence of dry rice cultivation in Southeast Asia, where the wild ancestor of the chicken, the red jungle hen, lived. The new agricultural practice on rice acted as a magnet for wild hens to come down from the trees that lived until then and to start “close contacts” with people, especially rice growers.

In the process, the domestication and finally the breeding of the chicken took place, as a result of which it became one of the most populous animals on Earth today. The study shows, however, that for a long time chickens were considered something exotic and only after many centuries were they treated as an important food source.

During the Iron Age in Europe, according to the researchers, the chickens were rather … respected and generally not considered food. Many of the first European chickens were buried alone or with humans (males more often with roosters and females with hens). It was the Roman Empire that made chickens and their eggs food, although in Britain until the 3rd century AD. chickens were usually not eaten.

Professor Naomi Sykes of the University of Exeter in the UK said: “Because we eat chicken so often, people think we’ve always eaten it. “But our evidence shows that our previous relationship with chickens was much more complex and that for centuries chickens have been the object of worship and respect.”

Professor Greger Larson of the University of Oxford said: “The new comprehensive reassessment of the chickens shows in principle how wrong our understanding so far has been of the time and place of the domestication of chickens. In addition – and perhaps even more interestingly – we showed that the arrival of dry rice cultivation was the catalyst both for the process of domestication of chicken and for its worldwide spread.

Dr Ophelia Lembraser of the University of Toulouse-Paul Sabatier and the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France described “chickens as ubiquitous and so popular today, yet they have been domesticated relatively recently”.