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.