When chickens ruled the roost
CHICKEN tikka masala or Kentucky fried nuggets would have our ancestors turning in their grave, according to West researchers.
Iron Age Brits were buried with the humble bird which was revered as a deity rather than a delicacy, say scientists.
Men were laid to rest with cockerels and females with hens.
An international team has rewritten the history of the world’s most popular meat and found it’s much more complicated than previously believed.
During the Iron Age in Europe, chickens were idolised and generally not regarded as food.
Co-author Professor Naomi Sykes, of Exeter University, said: “Eating chickens is so common people think we have never not eaten them.
“Our evidence shows our past relationship with chickens was far more complex and that for centuries chickens were celebrated and venerated.”
The findings are based on chicken remains from more than 600 sites in 89 countries ranging from Morocco, Greece and South America to Stonehenge and Orkney.
Bones, locations and historical records shed fresh light on the local societies and cultures.
Today, it is the ubiquitous food. A generation of Britons think chicken tikka masala is the national dish. In China there are 9,000 branches of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
But the bird’s domestication was tens of thousands of years in the making and was triggered by dry rice farming in China.
Co-author Prof Greger Larson, of Oxford University, said: “This comprehensive re-evaluation of chickens firstly demonstrates how wrong our understanding of the time and place of chicken domestication was.
“And even more excitingly, we show how the arrival of dry rice agriculture acted as a catalyst for both the chicken domestication process and its global dispersal.”
During the Iron Age, the birds were buried unbutchered, either alone or with people.
The Roman Empire then helped to popularise chickens and eggs as food.
In Britain chickens were not regularly consumed until the third century AD, mostly in urban and military sites.
Radiocarbon dating established the age of 23 of the proposed earliest chickens found in western Eurasia and north-west Africa.
Most of the bones were far more recent than previously thought, dispelling claims of chickens in Europe before the first millennium BC.
It indicates they did not arrive in the Mediterranean region until around 800 BC. It took almost 1,000 years longer for them to become established in the colder climates of Scotland, Ireland, Scandinavia and Iceland.
Co-author Dr Julia Best, of Cardiff University, said: “This is the first time radiocarbon dating has been used on this scale to determine the significance of chickens in early societies.”
The oldest bones of a definite domestic chicken were found at a Stone Age site in Thailand and date to between 1,650 and 1,250 BC.
It transforms our understanding of chickens, their spread across Asia into the west, and the changing way in which they were perceived in societies over the past 3,500 years.