The chicken or the egg? It was probably Asian rice that domesticated the famous fowl

A new study argues that cereal agriculture, such as rice farms, facilitated the domestication of wildfowl into chickens

The team pinpointed central Thailand as the birthplace of domesticated chickens

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A new study offers a theory about where and how chickens were first domesticated. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 3:00pm, 19 Jun 2022

Chickens are a staple of diets worldwide, found in cuisines and cultures of people who live far apart and share very few other cultural similarities.

However, pinpointing where domestic chickens originated has been a controversial task. The two most popular theories were that they were first domesticated on the Indian subcontinent and transported to Mesopotamia, or chickens came from northern China and spread west towards Europe.

A new study published in June in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal, challenges those ideas and offers an alternative theory.

The study argues that a species of jungle fowl found in what is now the region encompassing northern Myanmar, Thailand and southwest China was domesticated in central Thailand.

“Neolithic farming communities likely played an intentional role, by creating suitable living conditions and at some point preventing tame birds from escaping to the wild,” said Joris Peters, a professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich in Germany and an author of the study.

An 18th century painting of chickens during the Qing dynasty (1636-1912) in China. Photo: Getty Images

By analysing over 600 archaeological sites from 89 countries, the team said that the first unambiguous chicken bones were 3,500 years old and found at Ban Non Wat, a village in central Thailand most famous for its archaeological sites from the neolithic era to the Iron Age.

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