With a population of around 23 billion worldwide, chickens are the most numerous birds on our planet. With this in mind, it would only be natural to assume that the ancient bird bones found alongside other domesticated animals like dogs and pigs would be from these birds. But what if they weren’t?
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…new research suggests that another species was once a strong contender to become the world’s favorite poultry: ancient bird remains in China have turned out to be not from the first domesticated chickens, as researchers long assumed, but from pheasants. The study further indicates that wild pheasants lived side by side with people, shedding light on the early domestication process.
“It’s uncommon for us to have evidence of deer, for example, living with hunter-gatherers,” says Loukas Barton, an archaeologist at California-based environmental consulting firm Dudek. “But in this case, we see what otherwise is considered a wild animal living in the human biome.” Barton is lead author on the study, published in February in Scientific Reports.
More details about this study over at Scientific American.
(Image Credit: gary noon/ Wikimedia Commons)
Source: neatorama