Buzz
At some point over the past few millennia, an individual in India or Southeast Asia decided to try their hand at capturing one of the wild birds that sprinted through the jungles and roosted high in the trees. While we can't be certain about their original intentions, it's likely that the bird wasn't meant for the dinner table just yet. Archaeological evidence indicates that these birds were first captured for cockfighting, as pit matches between wild partridges and quails were already common. It wasn't until later that they became food. Regardless of the initial reason, jungle fowl were transported into villages in large numbers and eventually domesticated.
The familiar barnyard chicken we know today is the hybrid descendant of two species of wild junglefowl—the red junglefowl and the grey junglefowl—whose spread across the globe coincided with the movement of human populations. While we have a fairly clear understanding of when and how they made their way to Europe and Africa, the details of who brought them to the New World and when remain unclear, even controversial.
Crossing to the Other Side
For a long time, the widely accepted belief was that Europeans brought domestic chickens to the Americas during their colonial expansions following Christopher Columbus' voyage. However, a key detail complicates this: when Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro arrived in the Incan empire (modern-day Peru) in 1532, domestic chickens were already deeply integrated into the local culture, both as food and in religious rituals. These birds seemed to have been there for far longer than just a few decades following the first European contact. Yet, the idea of chickens existing in the pre-Columbian New World was dismissed and largely forgotten for nearly 500 years.
In 2002, archaeologists uncovered chicken bones at a pre-Columbian site on the coast of Chile, providing an opportunity to explore the origins and age of New World chickens. In 2007, an international team of scientists, led by Australian Alice Storey, took possession of the bones, conducted a radiocarbon dating, and sequenced their DNA. Their findings indicated that the bones dated back to a period between 1304 and 1424, long before Europeans even set foot in the Americas.
But how did the chickens make their way to South America from Asia? They can't fly, and not all of them are strong swimmers like this guy. The DNA of the ancient chicken included a distinctive genetic sequence identical to that found in prehistoric chickens from Tonga and Samoa, hinting that perhaps the chickens arrived in South America with early Polynesian explorers around 70 years or more before Europeans 'discovered' America.
Polynesian Chicken?
A year after Storey's team published their study, another international team of researchers, led by Australian Jaime Gongora, published a separate chicken study in the same journal. This team questioned Storey’s conclusions and, after conducting their own DNA analysis, found no evidence supporting the Polynesian chicken theory. They demonstrated that the genetic mutation linking the ancient Polynesian and South American chickens was, in fact, quite common in various chicken breeds worldwide. Thus, the South American chickens might have come from Polynesia or from virtually any other place that had chickens at the time. Extensive genetic surveys of modern South American chickens pointed exclusively to European origins. Gongora's team also disputed Storey’s carbon dating of the bones, suggesting that the site, El Arenal, located just a few miles from the ocean, might have caused oceanic carbon to influence the chicken's diet and skew the dating.
Storey's team acknowledged that the mutation they identified might not be unique, but they maintained that the genetics were irrelevant if their carbon dating was correct. Any chicken bones dated between 1000 and 1400 would fall within the timeframe of eastward Polynesian exploration, and there was no evidence of any other Asian peoples reaching South America during that period. They revisited the bones and recently published the results of a second carbon dating test.
This time, they analyzed three bones instead of just one and looked for any signs of seafood or marine plants in the chickens' diets that could potentially skew the carbon dating. The new dating results indicated that the bones dated as early as 1304 and as late as 1459, possibly more recent than initially thought, but still predating the arrival of Europeans. When combined with other evidence of Polynesian contact with the Americas—such as the presence of South American sweet potatoes in the Pacific before European contact and the similarity between the Quechua and Polynesian names for the vegetable (kumar and kumara)—it suggests that Polynesians, navigating in wooden rafts, might have brought the chicken, kicking and clucking, into the age of exploration, arriving in the New World before Columbus.
