How the chicken conquered the world

The saga beings thousands of years ago and ends in kitchens all over the globe.

Chicken is the ubiquitous food of our era, crossing multiple cultural boundaries with ease. With its mild taste and uniform texture, chicken presents a relatively blank canvas for the flavour palette of almost any cuisine.

Chickens are not naturally migratory. They have a small home range and can't fly or swim well. Their distribution throughout the world, then, is directly related to humans' interest (and appetite) in these creatures. Scientists believe the red jungle fowl, Gallus gallus, is the most likely progenitor of the modern chicken, although research suggests that the domestic chicken's yellow skin is a trait inherited from the gray jungle fowl, Gallus sonneratii, so it’s likely today’s chicken has multiple ancestors.

Chickens were probably first domesticated about 5,400 years ago in Southeast Asia, although archaeological evidence of wild chickens goes back even further, to a 12,000-year-old site in northern China. Once domesticated, though, chickens were brought westward to Europe and east-southeast into Oceania and the Americas.

Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

Eggs are much older than chickens. Dinosaurs laid eggs, the fish that first crawled out of the sea laid eggs, and the weird articulated monsters that swam in the warm shallow seas of the Cambrian Period 500 million years ago also laid eggs. They weren’t chicken’s eggs, but they were still eggs.

So the egg definitely came first. Unless you restate the question as ‘which came first, the chicken or the chicken’s egg?’ Then it very much depends on how you define a chicken’s egg. Is it an egg laid by a chicken? Or is it an egg that a chicken hatches from? Chickens are the same species as the red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia, although they were probably hybridised with the grey jungle fowl when they were domesticated 10,000 years ago.

But it doesn’t really matter… at some point in evolutionary history when there were no chickens, two birds that were almost-but-not-quite chickens mated and laid an egg that hatched into the first chicken. If you are prepared to call that egg a chicken’s egg, then the egg came first. Otherwise, the chicken came first, and the first chicken’s egg had to wait until the first chicken laid it. I’m glad we straightened that out!