Chickens may have been tamed for cockfighting before anyone thought to eat them
The world's most numerous farm bird descends mainly from the red junglefowl of Southeast Asia, domesticated roughly 8,000 years ago. Early keepers may have prized chickens for fighting and quail for their songs. Only later did people realise a captive bird was a steady source of eggs and meat.
Poultry means domesticated birds raised for meat, eggs or feathers: mainly chickens and turkeys, plus ducks and geese. Wild birds shot for the table count as game instead. Definitions stretch at the edges, with some authorities adding guinea fowl, young pigeons called squabs, quail or pheasants. The word comes through Middle English from the Old French pouletrie, while pullet and poult trace back to the Latin pullus, a young animal.
Genomic work once dated chicken domestication to about 5,400 years ago; newer studies of the four living junglefowl species push it back to around 8,000. A 2020 study in Nature that sequenced 863 chickens concluded that every domestic bird stems from a single domestication of red junglefowl in the region now covering southwestern China, northern Thailand and Myanmar. As chickens spread they bred with local wild junglefowl, and even the White Leghorn carries a patchwork of ancestries.
Austronesian seafarers carried chickens to Madagascar and across the Pacific from around 3500 BC. The birds reached the Indus Valley by about 2000 BC and Egypt some 250 years later, where they symbolised fertility and where people mastered the tricky art of artificial incubation. Romans read omens in their behaviour.
Large-scale keeping began around 1800, and intensive farms appeared in Britain about 1920 and in the United States once the Second World War ended. Meat birds had overtaken layers in economic importance within a few decades. Breeders now produce lightweight hens capable of 300 eggs a year, fast-growing broilers slaughtered young, and dual-purpose types. Poultry and pork together made up over 70 percent of the global meat supply in 2012, and people whose only meat is poultry are called pollotarians.
Source: Poultry
