When Did the Chicken Cross the Road: Archaeological and molecular evidence for ancient chickens in Central Asia

Abstract

The origins and dispersal of the chicken across the ancient world remains one of the most enigmatic questions regarding Eurasian domesticated animals1,2. The lack of agreement regarding the timing and center of origin is due, in large part, to issues with morphological identifications, a lack of direct dating, and poor preservation of thin bird bones. Historical sources attest to the prominence of chickens in southern Europe and southwest Asia by the last centuries BC3. Likewise, art historical depictions of chickens and anthropomorphic rooster-human chimeras are reoccurring motifs in Central Asian prehistoric and historic traditions4-6. However, when this ritually and economically significant bird spread along the trans-Eurasian exchange routes has remained a mystery. Here we show that chickens were widely raised by people at villages across southern Central Asia from the third century BC through medieval periods for their eggs and likely also meat. In this study, we present archaeological and molecular evidence for the cultivation of chickens for egg production from 12 different Central Asian archaeological sites spanning a millennium and a half. These eggshells were recovered in high abundance at all of these sites, suggesting that chickens were widely raised by people at villages across southern Central Asia from the third century BC through medieval periods and that they were an important part of the overall diet. Contrary to views that ancient peoples of Central Asia were primarily herding sheep, goat, and cattle, these data show that chicken was also important in the subsistence economy and that it was widely spread along the ancient Silk Road.

The Domestication and Dispersal of Large-Fruiting Prunus spp.: A Metadata Analysis of Archaeobotanical Material

“…is there archaeobotanical evidence attesting to its spread to other regions. These data seem to fit the current understanding of the Trans-Eurasian Exchange, as other East Asian domesticated plants and animals appear to have rapidly dispersed to the far ends of two continents at the same time, notably rice and chicken [98][99][100].…”

Life on the edge: Animal exploitation at the Shichengzi military fort (Xinjiang, China)

“…Apart from the main taxa that comprised the basis of the pastoral economy, domesticated fowls were also exploited. Recently molecular evidence from excavated eggshells suggests that by the third century BC, consumption of chicken and chicken eggs had been present across Central Asia (Peters et al, 2022). This result largely agrees with the zooarchaeological observation in northwest China (Liu, 2019) and textual records mentioning the utilization of chicken (Fan, 2009).…”

Cleaning the Dead: Optimized decontamination enhances palaeoproteomic analyses of Pleistocene skeletal material

“…In parallel to the development of bioinformatics approaches to characterise the diagenetic modification of proteins in palaeoproteomics contexts, a number of studies therefore mention approaches to decontaminate an archaeological sample prior to protein extraction. Such claimed methods include mechanical surface removal (Kontopoulos et al, 2020; Sawafuji et al, 2017; Wasinger et al, 2019), washing with bleach (sodium hypochlorite) (Froment et al, 2020; Sakalauskaite et al, 2020; Trolle Jensen et al, 2020), washing with ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) (Fagernäs et al, 2020; Hendy, Colonese, et al, 2018; Sawafuji et al, 2017), washing with hydrochloric acid (HCl) (Gasparini et al, 2022; Palmer et al, 2021; Wasinger et al, 2019), washing with water (Gasparini et al, 2022; Spengler et al, 2022), and UV irradiation (Fagernäs et al, 2020; Froment et al, 2020). Although a wide range of published protocols therefore include some kind of decontamination step, there is no consensus on which decontamination method should be used.…”