The chicken first crossed the road in Southeast Asia, landmark gene study finds
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
Indonesian for example have an endemic species, the green one, and are fond of producing red+green hybrids for navigation at open sea [1]. Green is the oldest species and does not live in China.
Then we have the chicken skin. Plucked chicken are typically yellow. Only a few chicken breeds have black skin, they are all black in fact, black beak, legs, caruncles, crest, inner organs and even black bones
But when we think in a plucked modern chicken is yellow. This is because the grey species, from India, provided the yellow gene. Therefore all (or almost) chicken that you can buy in the market have indian blood. Grey (and Ceylon's wildfowl) are endemic from Indian continent. And any study that is not sampling this areas would be incomplete.
The red was adapted to rainforest but is a species from bamboo cloud forests also in the mountains, so provided the cold resistance gene, and won in the battle being the easiest to breed.
[1] Each rooster has a different song that is really loud and unique from this animal. People go fishing with their pet rooster and thus can locate the position of all other people easily even in dense fog or open sea.
Araucanas, ameraucanas and olive eggers have its blood. It provided the genes for blue and green eggs.
TIL Indonesians breed roosters like Chocobos.
But then I remember that my species comes from eastern Africa...
They don't even seem that bothered by it. If you put a heater in the coop they don't make a point of perching near it, for example. They hate the snow like it's lava though.
What's actually more surprising than cold tolerance is that water tolerance; desert-y plants tend to be adapted to be needing periods where their roots are dry for long periods. Let them stand with wet feet and many desert plants get very upset.
I guess the middle east was wetter even in roman times, so perhaps that answers part of that.
To flip the chicken question around a bit, it's perhaps odd that chickens can cope not with the cold but with their native heat so well, what with wearing a full-body, heavy down jacket all the time in their native tropical jungle.
If you compare, say Inuit, Nordic, and native Siberian populations, to subsequent equatorial populations to higher latitudes, if you could find instances of low interbreeding, I wonder if we'd see certain genetic adaptations missing.
via Madagascar via South East Asia, assuming I'm remembering Jared Diamond correctly. I wonder if there are any Polynesian strains with interesting genetic diversity.
After we've all seen what SARS2 can do to the industrial world, the risk monoculture poses for breeding a bird flu which can jump to poultry handlers is simply unacceptable.
Monoculture, and the conditions of chicken husbandry, simply must improve. This is an existential risk.
Lucky for the chicken it has a personality which humans seem to get immense enjoyment out of.
My wife has gone a little chicken crazy since I brought home 4 pullets a couple years ago...
I'm interested in the origins of domestication not returning to some form of pastoral idealism. I need to strike "diversity" from my vocabulary. I should have said "interesting genetic variations".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#Origins_and_expansio...
So it's pretty clear that there are generations of children who were well aware of the connection, too. There must be something hidden in the details that would raise this study to the lofty level of "landmark."
Brick paving appeared in India around 3000BCE.
By 2000 BCE, the "leading edge" roads had become quite advanced: Minos had tens of kilometers worth of roads which were not just paved but mortared, on thick subgrade, with side-drains and distinct shoulders, and anatolian roads had sidewalks.
And early humans may have been baby ~chimpanzees that stopped developing, yet could produce offspring :)
The next time someone asks you this question, you can give them the following answer.
The question "Why did the chicken cross the road" is invalid. It is invalid because "why" assumes that the chicken had some reason for taking the action "cross the road". This, in turn, assumes that the chicken has the concept of "road"; after all, if the chicken doesn't know that the road is there, then the chicken did not - from the chickens point of view - cross the road, and consequently it is meaningless to ask for its motivations for doing so.
Since chicken is an animal, it is unlikely that it has the concept of road in the same sense than humans do; since it is a bird, whose ancestors were propably capable of flight in the near past, it is unlikely to have the concept of road in any sense - why would a flying bird need roads?
Therefore, the chicken can never have any motivation for crossing the road, since from the chickens point of view, it never does any such thing. It simply moves from one point to another, and these points happen to be on the opposite side of a flat area of ground. No road-crossing has happened.
Think of it this way: if you walk over a scent trail left by some animal, and you don't know that the trail is there, it is foolish to ask your motives of crossing that trail. One can ask your motives for walking in the first place, but the crossing was pure coincidence and not something you chose.
"He's constantly confusing, confounding, won't throw the towel / Everyone give it up for America's favourite fighting fowl"
[1] a "road" might also be a sea route, but it looks like land-based roads predate seaborne trade by several thousand years.
I don’t think so. It’s pretty normal to ask “why” questions about non-conscious entities. “Why does my stomach hurt?” “Why is the sky blue?” And so on.
I asked if chickens are conscious because, if the chicken is conscious (or at least if the question asker believes they are) than we’re asking the first sort of question and it may or may not be fair to call that question invalid based on a chicken’s conscious understanding and sysrpl’s reasoning.
If it’s not, then we can only reasonably ask the second kind of question and I agree it wouldn’t be “invalid” to do so.