Where does Chicken come from?
The chicken comes from mainland Southeast Asia. It descends mainly from the red junglefowl, a wild bird of the region's forests, and the oldest known chicken bones, roughly 3,500 years old, were found at Ban Non Wat in Thailand.
Drawn in by the fields
Chickens were long thought to be much older: early bird bones from northern China, once claimed as the first chickens, turned out on re-examination to be pheasants. A 2022 study checked chicken remains from some 600 sites in 89 countries. The first unambiguous chicken bones came from the Neolithic site of Ban Non Wat and date to about 1650–1250 BC. The researchers suggest that rice and millet fields, with their harvest leftovers, drew wild red junglefowl into villages.
Out of Southeast Asia
From there chickens spread slowly. They did not appear in central China, South Asia or Mesopotamia until the late second millennium BC. Northern Ethiopia had them by about 800–600 BC, probably carried across the Red Sea, and Mediterranean Europe by about 800 BC. In Egypt, chicken bones turn up only from about 550 BC, and chicken farming grew there under the Ptolemies, after 305 BC. Across the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Austronesian seafarers carried chickens along with dogs and pigs.
Why people say Europe
Europe met the chicken late, and at first seems to have revered it rather than eaten it. The earliest European chickens turn up as complete skeletons; butchery marks on their bones appear only centuries later. The first pictures of chickens in Europe are on Corinthian pottery of the 7th century BC. By the late 6th or early 5th century BC chickens had reached the Upper Rhine, the Danube basin and southeast England, and breeding grew under the Roman Empire.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ↗
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