From chicken biryani to khao mun gai, chicken and rice is a winning combo worldwide. But the two are more inextricably linked than even chefs realized. A pair of new archaeological studies suggest that without rice, chickens may have never existed.
The work reveals that chickens may have been domesticated thousands of years later than scientists thought, and only after humans began cultivating rice within range of the wild red jungle fowl, in Thailand or nearby in peninsular Southeast Asia, says Dale Serjeantson, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton who was not involved with the research. The studies, she says, have “dismantled many of the hoary myths about chicken origins.”
Charles Darwin proposed that chickens descended from the red jungle fowl—a colorful tropical bird in the pheasant family–because the two look so much alike. But proving him right has been difficult. Five varieties of jungle fowl range from India to northern China, and small chicken bones are rare in fossil sites.
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