Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (5 page)

In the next pen is a green jungle fowl. Its natural home is on Java and Bali, islands of today's Indonesia, more than two thousand miles east of Sri Lanka. This rooster stands strangely immobile, and stares at us with an unnerving intensity. He seems confident in his magnificent plumage, which is the most dramatic of all jungle fowl. His body shades from the color of long-exposed bronze to an emerald green. Feathers at his throat are a sky blue and bright violet, with splashes of ocher and electric yellow, and his comb shades from light blue to deep red.

What's odd, Johnson says as we stand in front of the motionless
green jungle fowl, is that these three sister species are skittish, but not suicidally so. He's never had to use dental floss on the birds on this side of his barnyard. Nor do the grouse, quail, partridge, and golden pheasant in the other pens approach the wild and untamed spirit of the red jungle fowl. He tries to avoid going into the pens with the reds more than once in three days to limit their trauma.

The unusual nature of these red jungle fowl recently drew the attention of Leif Andersson, a biologist at Sweden's Uppsala University who has pioneered DNA sequencing of domesticated animals as a way to track their genetic past. He was part of the team that published the chicken genome in 2004. As Brisbin had decades earlier, Andersson realized that he needed a reliably wild chicken to compare with the domesticated variety in order to map the differences more accurately. In 2011, he visited Johnson's farm to take a look at these unusual animals and sample their blood. The DNA of the Richardson birds, now being sequenced in Andersson's Uppsala lab, could help unlock important clues to the chickens' murky history, particularly if they prove to be among the last with an undiluted genome.

On our way back to South Carolina, Brisbin muses on the mystery of chicken domestication. Biologists are still arguing over when, where, and why the bird left the jungle for the backyard. Thousands of years ago, somewhere in South Asia, it merged with human society. Our farming ancestors may have welcomed an animal that feasted on weeds and pests, hunters may have captured it in the forest and brought home live birds that eventually were tamed, and foragers could have found unhatched eggs and incubated them artificially. Brisbin believes, however, that only a genetic mutation that turned off the fowl's natural skittishness could have paved the way for the more placid modern bird. “There's a five percent chance that when you hold one it will die,” he says of Johnson's jungle fowl. This shift from wild creature to barnyard chicken—possibly just a random turn of the genetic dials—was a dramatic transformation of the animal, with big implications for our own species.

Suddenly, a squirrel darts in front of the car. I swerve, but hit the unfortunate animal. Brisbin orders me to turn around. “Do you have
a bag?” he asks with an almost childlike eagerness. “Let's not waste it.” We return to find its head flattened, but it is otherwise unmarked. “It's perfect,” he says, placing the bag in my backseat. Then he chuckles and confides that his collecting unnerves the sentries at the gate of the Savannah River nuclear site. “The guards don't want to check my car because there may be a snake or an alligator in it.” He glances into the backseat. “Remind me to retrieve it when we get back to my place.”

A couple of months later, I call the retired Richardson, curious as to how this self-taught slaughterhouse owner maintained Bump's difficult birds so successfully for so many decades, despite the ­ever-present threat of heart failure or disease. If anyone would have a gut feeling as to how this bird became the docile creature of today's factory farms, it would be him.

A woman answers the phone in his home in Tuscaloosa. “I buried him six weeks ago,” Richardson's wife says. “He was eighty-three years old and had never been in the hospital.” I give her my condolences, and then her daughter takes the phone and introduces herself. “He was very particular about their care,” she explains when I ask about the red jungle fowl. “He kept them separated and wouldn't let them breed with other birds. And if anyone else came around—even me—the birds would be all in a tear.” She adds that just a couple of weeks before he died, she asked him why he prized these fussy and difficult fowl so highly. “He said, ‘I like them because there is no way to tame them.' He said, ‘I like them because of what they are—wild.' ”

2.

The Carnelian Beard

And lo, the Rooster King, how he slums like the Lord!

And lo, the Rooster King, how he chases from these vacant lots the lesser, more domestic, cocks!

And lo, the Rooster King, how he spreads, as gasoline,

His wings, O, stained-glass butterfly!

—Jay Hopler, “The Rooster King”

T
he chicken's grandest entrance in history took place on a bright autumn day in 1474 BC, when four fowl were carried triumphantly into Thebes, the world's largest and wealthiest city, under the eyes of the powerful Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III. The whole city turned out to see the lavish procession. Magnificent horses pulled chariots plated in gold and electrum that reflected the sun, blinding the crowd as they rolled down the city's triumphal avenue. Nubian retainers carried huge ivory tusks from Syrian elephants shot by the pharaoh himself. Strangely clothed captives singing in guttural tongues passed by, as did prancing bears and a live elephant—all loot from a six-month-long military campaign in the Middle East. The sons of foreign princes who were kept as hostages trundled by in gilded cages similar to those that held the colorful birds.

The four exotics were tribute paid by Babylonian princes to the king, who is still remembered as one of Egypt's most successful military and political leaders. Only five foot three inches tall, Thutmose III's conquests took him across the Euphrates River and into Mesopotamia—today's Iraq—where he had thrashed his opponents and returned to his capital city that Egyptians called Waset and Homer praised as “the world's great treasure house . . . with its one-hundred gates.”

Thutmose had the annals of the successful invasion carved into the walls of Thebes's great temple of Karnak, which lay at one end of the wide avenue that led to the capital's Luxor sanctuary. Since there was no hieroglyph to describe this previously unknown creature and the stone is damaged at key spots, there is no absolute certainty that the gifts were chickens. But the inscription identifies a Mesopotamian bird that does something every day, which Egyptologists think is laying an egg. Not until the twentieth century were most hens capable of laying an egg a day, so that claim may have been among the many boastful exaggerations carved into the blocks. But no other bird fits the description as well as the chicken.

Ancient Egypt was for much of its history an insular land defined by its life-giving Nile River and its fertile delta that pushes into the Mediterranean Sea. With rich harvests, deserts to the east and west, the sea to the north, and the African savannas to the south, Egyptians for much of their early history did not stray far from their valley. That changed during the early New Kingdom, when Thutmose III's grandfather Thutmose I moved troops into the Levant. They were mesmerized when they experienced rainfall for the first time, calling it “the Nile falling from the sky.” The heyday of the New Kingdom brought the world to Egypt's rulers. Thutmose III's stepmother, the pharaoh Hatshepsut, sent ships down the Red Sea to the land of Punt, which may have been today's Somalia or Ethiopia, to obtain frankincense, ivory, ebony, and myrrh trees to transplant in Egyptian soil. She also encouraged international trade in the Mediterranean. The chicken's arrival marked more than the spread of one species. It underscored Egypt's newfound interest in exploring and
conquering the outside world and collecting foreign goods, plants, and animals.

Thutmose III was personally entranced by exotics. Near the Karnak walls inscribed with the mention of the bird that lays every day is a room with carved representations of pomegranates, iris, gazelles, and other species not native to Egypt. Across the Nile, on the barren west bank set aside for tombs and funerary temples, his vizier Rekhmire was buried with metal vases thought to be a tribute brought by Minoans from the island of Crete. One is incised with images of lion, bull, and antelope heads. There is also a crudely drawn bird with two wattles, a comb, and a pointed beak that may be one of the oldest known images of a rooster.

The chicken was a rare and royal bird in ancient Egypt, a fact that only came to light in 1923. Working in the Valley of the Kings, west of Thebes, Howard Carter unearthed the tomb of King Tutankhamen in late 1922. Four months later he reported finding a broken piece of pottery between the nearby tombs of Ramses IX and Akhenaten, Tutankhamen's predecessor and a religious renegade who ruled a century and a half after Thutmose III and focused Egyptian worship on the sun god. Carter was overwhelmed with the thousands of objects stuffed in King Tut's burial chambers that would consume the next decade of his life, as well as the immense global publicity surrounding the find. His sponsor and friend Lord Carnarvon had died just two weeks before in Cairo—either from an infected mosquito bite or, more popularly, a curse placed on the tomb. Yet the sought-after Egyptologist was excited enough by the little pottery piece to write an extended paper of what he called not only “the earliest known drawing of the domestic cock in the form of the Red Jungle-fowl” but “absolute authentic evidence of the domestic fowl . . . being known to ancient Thebans.”

The drawing on the little triangular-shaped bit of limestone, now kept in the British Museum, is utterly charming. It lacks the formality and stilted quality of so many ancient Egyptian statues and friezes. Instead, it is a bold ink sketch with a large serrated comb, prominent wattles, closed wings, and a wide flared tail. This rooster is clearly
drawn by someone who has seen a live one. It struts its stuff like any barnyard fowl, “which suggests,” adds Carter, “that in that early period its domestication was already accomplished.”

Based on its location, he dated the small fragment to between the time of Akhenaten, around 1300 BC, and the end of the New Kingdom in 1100 BC after a series of devastating droughts and wars left it at the mercy of foreign rulers. This is only a rough guess, but Carter's find was long the oldest indisputable image of a chicken in Egypt. The other candidate is a silver bowl that shows a rooster amid scenes of farming, an elegant vessel found in the Nile delta with intriguing elements of Egyptian and West Asian styles. Thought to date to about 1000 BC, the vessel in fact may have been made in the glory days of Ramses II in the thirteenth century BC, according to the art historian Christine Lilyquist. The rooster's presence on the artifact may hint at a religious rather than an agricultural role for the bird, since it was found in a temple to the cat goddess Bastet, who protected Egyptians from contagious diseases and evil spirits.

But if the chicken was special, it remained alien. In the unsettled centuries following the demise of the New Kingdom, Egyptians buried more than rulers and viziers. They also mummified hundreds of thousands of animals. From cats to crocodiles, the dead creatures were preserved for the afterlife because they were dearly beloved pets, to feed the human dead, or in honor of a specific god in the complex Egyptian pantheon. Amid more than thirty cemeteries that hold 20 million animal remains, including 4 million ibis, archaeologists have yet to find a single mummified chicken. The exotic in ancient Egypt was fascinating, noteworthy, and a sign of status. But it was not sacred.

By contrast, there are lots of goose mummies. When the chicken arrived in Thebes amid much pageantry, geese were already domesticated and living in poultry yards. A migratory bird, they were at first seasonal visitors to the Nile valley. Drawn to the rich grain fields of ancient Egypt, they learned to live with humans, providing a ready supply of meat, a couple dozen large eggs a year, and an effective warning system against intruders.

In the long run, geese proved no match for a bird that could be bred to lay more eggs, grow much faster, and eat a wider variety of food, including the ticks and mosquitoes that flourish in the humid Nile environment. Roosters also were reliable heralds of dawn in the era before alarm clocks. In a land of farmers, this was a welcome trait. The new arrival was poised to overtake its competitors as the most useful bird in the West.

Twenty-five hundred miles separate the Nile valley from the westernmost edge of the red jungle fowl's habitat in Pakistan. The chicken's journey from east to west coincided with the rise of the world's first three urban civilizations a thousand years before Thutmose III's reign. Thanks to bones, clay tablets, and a scattering of artifacts, archaeologists have begun to trace how the bird leapfrogged from one culture to the other in the first stirrings of a globalized world.

That journey began along the two-thousand-mile-long Indus River, which flows out of the Himalayas and empties into the Arabian Sea. While the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom labored on their pyramids, the people of the Indus civilization built a society larger and more populous than either Egypt or Mesopotamia. Its half-dozen major cities boasted broad streets, innovative water systems, and sewers unmatched in the ancient world until the rise of Rome. A system of symbols—as yet undeciphered—was widely used. Wheeled carts, riverboats, and seagoing ships connected an area exceeding a million square miles with a population of several million people, who grew barley, millet, wheat, and rice in fields plowed by water buffalo; herded goats and sheep; and hunted boar and wild birds.

Indus hunters would have been familiar with the red jungle fowl on the northern end of their civilization in the Himalayan foothills, as well as the gray that lived on the far southeast fringe, around the Indian province of Gujarat, which touches the Arabian Sea. Just a few days' walk from the red jungle fowl's present home in the Himalayan foothills is the northern metropolis of the Indus, the city of Harappa. Harappa once sprawled over two hundred fifty acres along the Ravi
River, its walled neighborhoods home to twenty-five thousand people or more during the Indus heyday between 2600 BC and 1900 BC—roughly contemporary with the second half of Egypt's Old Kingdom.

Unfortunately, Harappa's first excavators were British railroad engineers in the middle of the nineteenth century. Surprised and delighted to find thousands of buried baked bricks in a rural backwater, the engineers directed their local workers to use this material as the bed of the Lahore railway. At the time, no one suspected that an Indus civilization ever existed. Only later, as Carter was examining the piece of Egyptian pottery depicting a rooster, did archaeologists realize that Indian passengers and freight were clicking along on tracks that sat on the reused scraps of one of the world's first great cities.

Richard Meadow and his colleague Ajita Patel worked for years at Harappa until Pakistan's uncertain security situation halted excavations, and they have the best collection of bird bones from an Indus site. On a cold spring day I visit them at their zooarchaeology laboratory at Harvard University's Peabody Museum in Cambridge. The lab's entrance is just to the right of a Mesoamerican mural of a warrior holding his rival's severed head. Meadow, a tall and taciturn New Englander, and Patel, a diminutive and talkative Indian woman, share a crowded office piled high with books and papers and decorated with eerie wooden masks made by a Creek Native American.

They take turns explaining that identifying chicken bones is no simple task. Many archaeologists fudge by giving them a generic label such as chickenlike or chicken-sized. The region is rife with cousins to the domesticated bird, such as the chukar, francolin, and quail, which leave behind similar bones. Thousands of years of wear and tear make identification even more difficult. Differentiating a red jungle fowl bone from that of a chicken is even more problematic. Though today's domesticated bird is generally much larger than the wild ancestor, this may not have applied four millennia ago.

And if chickens were an important source of food, Meadow adds that the Indus people may have eaten much of the evidence by crunching on the ends of bones, a practice he says is still common in that part of the world. These cartilage structures provide the best
clues to a particular species. Extracting DNA from Indus bird bones holds promise, but many of the bird remains were excavated years ago and have been subject to decades of possible contamination.

Harappa is close to the red jungle fowl's current range, but other Indus sites are not. At Mohenjo Daro, located halfway between the mountains and the sea in Pakistan, scientists found a four-inch-long femur bone that excavators describe as very “chickenlike.” Today's modern factory-farmed chicken has a femur measuring just shy of five inches, while the red jungle fowl's averages less than three inches. West of Delhi, the Indian archaeologist Vasant Shinde has discovered similar bones in what was a modest Indus town that he is convinced come from chickens.

Along with a dearth of chicken bones, the Indus people left behind frustratingly few traces of their day-to-day life in this enigmatic civilization. Scholars have yet to decipher their symbols, and unlike ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians, they produced no known life-sized statues, only tiny figurines. One enterprising archaeologist recently sorted through thousands of small hand-molded clay figurines found at dozens of Indus excavations and largely neglected by previous generations of researchers. Among the figures in various collections in Harappa, the Lahore Museum, and the National Museum, New Delhi, were several that are decidedly chickenlike. One seems to sport a comb and a curved tail similar to that of either a chicken or jungle fowl. Another looks like a rooster wearing a collar. That doesn't necessarily mean it was domesticated, since wild birds might be chained, and other figurines of rhinos and tigers occasionally have collars as well. Two birds feeding in a dish may or may not be chickens, but the scene is a compelling image of domesticated birds. The Indus people did keep birds in cages. A small terra-cotta cage was recently unearthed that is similar in size to those still used in modern Pakistan for housing live partridge and quail.