The chicken first crossed the road in Southeast Asia, landmark gene study finds

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/chicken-first-crossed-road-southeast-asia-landmark-gene-study-finds

142 54 6 years ago

Every winter, looking at our chickens roosting in their unheated coop at -15C, I marvel at the ability of the descendant of a bird from the tropics to survive in a Canadian winter.

But then I remember that my species comes from eastern Africa...

markdown• 6 years ago

I imagine that chickens had to adapt to the cold much much much faster than humans had to.

cmrdporcupine3• 6 years ago

Yes, and I get the advantage of clothes :-)

They don't even seem that bothered by it. If you put a heater in the coop they don't make a point of perching near it, for example. They hate the snow like it's lava though.

throwaway_pdp092• 6 years ago

I live in the UK and I am amazed that date palms do well here, in a country with much higher rainfall and it does get colder than the middle east. Also agaves seem quite happy (what tequila is made out of.

What's actually more surprising than cold tolerance is that water tolerance; desert-y plants tend to be adapted to be needing periods where their roots are dry for long periods. Let them stand with wet feet and many desert plants get very upset.

I guess the middle east was wetter even in roman times, so perhaps that answers part of that.

To flip the chicken question around a bit, it's perhaps odd that chickens can cope not with the cold but with their native heat so well, what with wearing a full-body, heavy down jacket all the time in their native tropical jungle.

koheripbal• 6 years ago

That depends which humans. We are not one monolithic gene pool. Human diversity means that more recent migrations of humans had less time to adjust to their new climates.

If you compare, say Inuit, Nordic, and native Siberian populations, to subsequent equatorial populations to higher latitudes, if you could find instances of low interbreeding, I wonder if we'd see certain genetic adaptations missing.

sradman2• 6 years ago

But then I remember that my species comes from eastern Africa...

via Madagascar via South East Asia, assuming I'm remembering Jared Diamond correctly. I wonder if there are any Polynesian strains with interesting genetic diversity.

samstave• 6 years ago

Sadly, haven't Humans worked diligently to eliminate genetic diversity in chickens - look at the history of how the Rocky Chicken, the most widely eaten chicken was bred.

sradman2• 6 years ago

I was being fuzzy with my language. Between 5kya and 3kya [1], the domesticated chickens that began their journey in mainland Asia ended up as part of the standard toolkit of the Melanesian and Polynesian people that spread widely throughout the Pacific. If any of those chicken strains remain, they might be genetically unique compared to what we find in mainland Asia today.

I'm interested in the origins of domestication not returning to some form of pastoral idealism. I need to strike "diversity" from my vocabulary. I should have said "interesting genetic variations".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#Origins_and_expansio...

tibbydudeza• 6 years ago

I wonder how far the Chickenosaurus project is coming along.

scorecard• 6 years ago

There is progress toward Jurassic Park. 1. Gene edits turn a bill into something like a dinosaur snout: https://www.livescience.com/50886-scientific-progress-dino-c... 2. early birds may have been baby dinosaurs that stopped developing, yet could produce off spring, according to another recent DNA study I can't locate at the moment. Now if that development process could be turned back on in a bird ...

mirimir• 6 years ago

2. early birds may have been baby dinosaurs that stopped developing, yet could produce off spring, according to another recent DNA study I can't locate at the moment.

And early humans may have been baby ~chimpanzees that stopped developing, yet could produce offspring :)

jshprentz• 6 years ago

Unanswered is the question of where and when a chicken would first have an opportunity to cross a road. The article reports that researchers traced chickens genetically back to southeast Asian pheasants domesticated around 7500 BCE. Beyond the title, the article mentions nothing about roads. At what point in history did some trails and paths become roads?

masklinn• 6 years ago

There were stone-paved streets in Harappa and Ur, circa 4000BCE. There's also evidence of log roads in England appearing between 4000 BCE and 3800BCE.

Brick paving appeared in India around 3000BCE.

By 2000 BCE, the "leading edge" roads had become quite advanced: Minos had tens of kilometers worth of roads which were not just paved but mortared, on thick subgrade, with side-drains and distinct shoulders, and anatolian roads had sidewalks.

mrlonglong2• 6 years ago

And the Romans perfected the art of building long and straight roads, some of which still are in use today.

jccooper• 6 years ago

Apparently there's evidence for domesticated chickens appear Mohenjo-Daro by c2000 BCE. That may be the first paved road that a chicken crossed. There would have been plenty of dirt paths all over the world well before the advent of the chicken, and I shouldn't be surprised at all to find a timber trackway in east Asia 4000 BCE or earlier. (There's one in Britain from that time.)

kinghtown2• 6 years ago

I guess this is why Korean and Taiwanese fried chicken is the best.

quicklime• 6 years ago

I don't follow, Korea and Taiwan are not part of South-East Asia?

kinghtown2• 6 years ago

I really need to read links before posting any comments. My bad. (Taiwan’s fried chicken is still really amazing.)

lazylizard• 6 years ago

And its gonna be hard to find ayam penyet in taiwan or korea...

kyuudou• 6 years ago

Korea, generally no. Taiwan, sometimes.

sysrpl• 6 years ago

Why did the chicken cross the road?

The next time someone asks you this question, you can give them the following answer.

The question "Why did the chicken cross the road" is invalid. It is invalid because "why" assumes that the chicken had some reason for taking the action "cross the road". This, in turn, assumes that the chicken has the concept of "road"; after all, if the chicken doesn't know that the road is there, then the chicken did not - from the chickens point of view - cross the road, and consequently it is meaningless to ask for its motivations for doing so.

Since chicken is an animal, it is unlikely that it has the concept of road in the same sense than humans do; since it is a bird, whose ancestors were propably capable of flight in the near past, it is unlikely to have the concept of road in any sense - why would a flying bird need roads?

Therefore, the chicken can never have any motivation for crossing the road, since from the chickens point of view, it never does any such thing. It simply moves from one point to another, and these points happen to be on the opposite side of a flat area of ground. No road-crossing has happened.

Think of it this way: if you walk over a scent trail left by some animal, and you don't know that the trail is there, it is foolish to ask your motives of crossing that trail. One can ask your motives for walking in the first place, but the crossing was pure coincidence and not something you chose.

jameshart• 6 years ago

Tl;dr: to get to the other side

082349872349872• 6 years ago

The blood sport connection makes me wonder "when the chicken crossed the road[1], what was his entrance music?"

"He's constantly confusing, confounding, won't throw the towel / Everyone give it up for America's favourite fighting fowl"

[1] a "road" might also be a sea route, but it looks like land-based roads predate seaborne trade by several thousand years.

baddox2• 6 years ago

"why" assumes that the chicken had some reason for taking the action "cross the road".

I don’t think so. It’s pretty normal to ask “why” questions about non-conscious entities. “Why does my stomach hurt?” “Why is the sky blue?” And so on.

cgriswald3• 6 years ago

Does a chicken have consciousness? If so, when talking about conscious beings, are we using why in the sense that we use it when asking why the sky is blue?

cgriswald3• 6 years ago

Do I have to have the same understanding of a road as you do to intentionally cross it? Maybe my understanding is only “the thing that makes me feet hot when I walk on it.” I can still make a conscious decision whether I want to get my feet hot in order to accomplish something on the other side.

kumarharsh• 6 years ago

I think it'd be easier to reply "I don't know" than killing the party with this answer.

daseiner1• 6 years ago

if this was intended as an anti-joke, good work. if you’re being sincere, good god man lighten up

partyboat1586• 6 years ago

Thought this was an Onion headline at first.

econcon• 6 years ago

Doesn't it make sense that flying dragons fossils are often found in South East Asia so chickens appeared there?

SeanLuke• 6 years ago

I am confused. I thought it was long established that the chicken came from SE Asia. Why is this article a "landmark study"?

ksaj2• 6 years ago

I just mentioned this article to my Vietnamese partner, and got a lengthy story about how the modern chicken came from SE Asian pheasants, which are often referred to as "jungle chickens," as taught 30+ years ago in primary school.

So it's pretty clear that there are generations of children who were well aware of the connection, too. There must be something hidden in the details that would raise this study to the lofty level of "landmark."

aspaceman• 6 years ago

Maybe it provided genetic evidence for this human oral history? I would consider that landmark personally. Although writing an article about it is harder.

pvaldes3• 6 years ago

There are four species of Gallus. Only one, the red jungle fowl hens, became the mother of modern chicken, in several places at the same time, but the history is more complicated than that.

Indonesian for example have an endemic species, the green one, and are fond of producing red+green hybrids for navigation at open sea [1]. Green is the oldest species and does not live in China.

Then we have the chicken skin. Plucked chicken are typically yellow. Only a few chicken breeds have black skin, they are all black in fact, black beak, legs, caruncles, crest, inner organs and even black bones

But when we think in a plucked modern chicken is yellow. This is because the grey species, from India, provided the yellow gene. Therefore all (or almost) chicken that you can buy in the market have indian blood. Grey (and Ceylon's wildfowl) are endemic from Indian continent. And any study that is not sampling this areas would be incomplete.

The red was adapted to rainforest but is a species from bamboo cloud forests also in the mountains, so provided the cold resistance gene, and won in the battle being the easiest to breed.

[1] Each rooster has a different song that is really loud and unique from this animal. People go fishing with their pet rooster and thus can locate the position of all other people easily even in dense fog or open sea.

coderintherye• 6 years ago

Wow, rooster identification as sort of a "Marco-Polo" is rather ingenious.

pvaldes3• 6 years ago

Yes but this couldn't be done with the red. The green junglefowl is a mangrove species, so was particularly well suited for the fishermen lifestyle. It feeds on fishes, starfishes and marine animal's carcasses stranded in beaches and can survive without drinking freshwater for a longer time. Is perfect for long distance open sea travel and to colonize small isolate islands without permanent sources of freshwater

Araucanas, ameraucanas and olive eggers have its blood. It provided the genes for blue and green eggs.

pmcp• 6 years ago

and are fond of producing red+green hybrids for navigation at open sea

TIL Indonesians breed roosters like Chocobos.

fortran77• 6 years ago

The question isn't when. It's _why_.

monadic2• 6 years ago

I’m fairly sure this hypothesis predates Darwin.

The chicken first crossed the road in Southeast Asia, landmark gene study finds

Related Stories