which the chicken belongs, is a mere 8 million
years old, and Gallus gallus, the chicken
species, has been around only for the last 3 to
4 million years.
For a barnyard commoner, the chicken has
a surprisingly exotic background. Its
immediate ancestors were jungle fowl native
to tropical and subtropical Southeast Asia and
India. The chicken more or less as we know it
was probably domesticated in Southeast Asia
before 7500 BCE, which is when larger-than-
wild bones date from in Chinese finds far
north of the jungle fowl’s current range. By
1500 BCE chickens had found their way to
Sumer and Egypt, and they arrived around 800
BCE in Greece, where they became known as
“Persian birds,” and where quail were the
primary source of eggs.
The Domestic Egg We’ll never know exactly
why chickens were domesticated, but they
may well have been valued more for their