The history of the domesticated chicken is going well, at least the parts that I have completed. I was editing the section that touched upon the ancestor of the domestic chicken - commonly held to be the red jungle fowl. This piece of information had been given to me as an uncontested fact from the first time I had asked the question. When I was writing it, I wanted to cite an authoritative source so did a simple search in the hopes of just finding a reasonable citation and then moving on. What I found was far more interesting and made me very sad that I hadn’t spent more time paying attention in biology class.

In a couple of periodicals, there was a reference to a Swedish study (”Identification of the Yellow Skin Gene Reveals a Hybrid Origin of the Domestic Chicken”) that was published in the Public Library of Science’s Genetics Journal. The article is available here. This research is the first

This research says that the yellow skin gene, which is a common gene in domestic chickens, is not found in red jungle fowl but are found in grey jungle fowl. This is the first definitive proof that there is a hybrid origin to the domestic chicken. Previously, Dr. F. B. Hutt had posited that

This genetic debate aside, what is clear is that domesticated chickens were likely to have been brought to the West on the same routes as the spice trade. This would have been the most logical way for chickens to have moved into Western Europe. It would also be logical to assume that there were chickens in the Near East and China that may have been interbred with those chickens, providing the the variety of characteristics that they eventually displayed. Unfortunately, I have found no documentation of this, nor have I found documentation that mentions the specifics of the early introduction of chickens in Western Europe. The first documentation that I can find about chickens is in 77 ACE in Platina’s “The Historie of Nature”, which I will discuss in a later update.

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