Date: November 3, 2016
Source: Washington University in St. Louis
The discarded bone of a chicken leg, still etched with teeth
marks from a dinner thousands of years ago, provides some of the oldest known
physical evidence for the introduction of domesticated chickens to the continent
of Africa, research from Washington University in St. Louis has confirmed.
Based on radiocarbon dating of about 30 chicken bones
unearthed at the site of an ancient farming village in present-day Ethiopia,
the findings shed new light on how domesticated chickens crossed ancient roads
-- and seas -- to reach farms and plates in Africa and, eventually, every other
corner of the globe.
"Our study provides the earliest directly dated evidence
for the presence of chickens in Africa and points to the significance of Red
Sea and East African trade routes in the introduction of the chicken,"
said Helina Woldekiros, lead author and a postdoctoral anthropology researcher
in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.
The main wild ancestor of today's chickens, the red junglefowl
Gallus gallus is endemic to sub-Himalayan northern India, southern China and
Southeast Asia, where chickens were first domesticated 6,000-8,000 years ago.
Now nearly ubiquitous around the world, the offspring of these
first-domesticated chickens are providing modern researchers with valuable
clues to ancient agricultural and trade contacts.
The arrival of chickens in Africa and the routes by which they
both entered and dispersed across the continent are not well known. Previous
research based on representations of chickens on ceramics and paintings, plus
bones from other archaeological sites, suggested that chickens were first
introduced to Africa through North Africa, Egypt and the Nile Valley about
2,500 years ago.
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