The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens

While we take chicken and eggs for granted, it is amazing to think that the pyramids pre-date that by a thousand years, and those ancient populations never tasted chicken !

There's this place in Northern California where a population of chickens established and are sort of a local attraction. It's literally just a suburb. Always blows my mind to think how these jungle birds are able to adapt to such a wide array of environments

Other things that might make you look at your kitchen differently:

- potatoes (and tomatoes) originated in the Andes. Irish people basically had to be forced to grow them. It was the key technology that helped Europe stop it's vicious cycle of famine after famine. In the Andes they also have literally hundreds of varieties of potatoes that they know by name (some are used in soups, some are ornamental, some are medicinal, many have distinct flavor profiles)

- bell peppers are also from the Americas. I'm eastern european and grew up hearing about my great grandparents recipes for making sundried red bell peppers

- Native americans used a complex process called nixtamalization to make maize edible called. Colonists basically took maize and forced Africans to grow it for them but didn't carry over the knowledge of nixtamalization. Causing mass famines wherever they replaced native crops with maize in Africa

- avocados (americas), pawpaws (americas), and mangoes (india) both relied on megafaunal species to spread. Likely giant sloths for avocados buffalo for pawpaws, and elepphants for mangoes. All of these have been completely or mostly displaced by humans and would probably now go extinct without us

They are a species of hot coastal jungles but evolved also in bamboo cloud forests (mist forests in mountains), this is not trivial, because chickens can survive in cold areas and even tolerate snow, and this is required to live in most Europe and US. Without those "chill genes", chicken would never had been a successful species in Occident.

Evolving in bamboo cloud forests provided the other big weapon that chickens had to conquer the planet: After many years bamboos flower, seed and die.

Chicken evolved to make the most of those years of huge seed production and in those exceptional years reproduce non stop, as many times as they can, instead to lay just once as in normal years.

This trait was selected later, so in a coop with plenty of food, chicken just lay, and lay, and keep laying. Enduring a wide range of temperatures, and laying more than 300 eggs a year (plus a convenient size, plus roosters fighting and singing to our amusement), made jungle red-fowl the most successful bird in the planet just by pure luck