Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Chickens

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

Subscribe to the podcast!  https://podfollow.com/everythingeverywhere/ Record your family's memories at https://StoryWorth.com/Everything -------------------------------- Around 10,000 years ago, someone in Southeast Asia captured a bird that lived on the floor of the jungle. Today, billions of descendants of that bird now live on six different continents and provide food for billions of people.  Yet, the birds which exist today are often very different birds from the ones which were domesticated over ten millennia ago. Much of that change has occurred in just the last 70 years.  Learn more about the chicken, and how they became one of the most common birds in the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. -------------------------------- Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast." or "Everything Everywhere is part of the Airwave Media podcast network Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Around 10,000 years ago, someone in Southeast Asia captured a bird that lived on the floor of the jungle. Today, billions of descendants of that bird now live on six different continents and provide food for billions of people. Yet the birds which exist today are often very different from the ones which were domesticated over 10 millennia ago. And much of that change has occurred in just the last 70 years. Learn more about the chicken and how they became one of the most common birds in the world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. In 2005, a paleontologist working in Montana found the bones of a 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex. Inside one of the bones, he found something which was very rare. He found a small piece of a blood vessel. Soft tissue is almost never found inside fossilized bones. After a chemical analysis of the protein in the tissue, they found something extraordinary. The closest living relative to the Tyrannosaurus rex is the chicken. So if you ever want to tell your kids to eat their chicken or their eggs, just tell them it's a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It isn't totally true, but it also

isn't totally false either. The domesticated chicken that we know originated in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Most domesticated animals were domesticated around 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, and the chicken is no exception. The only difference between chicken and cattle is that the ancient ancestor of the chicken actually still exists today. The chicken come from four different species of wild jungle fowl, which are native to Southeast Asia. One DNA study claimed that the modern chicken descended from a species located in the mountains of southwest China, northern Thailand, and northeast Myanmar. These may have then interbred with other wild species located in India and China.

The scientific name for the wild version of the jungle fowl is Gallus-Gallus, and the domesticated animal that we know as the chicken is Gallas-Gallis domesticus. Given its starting point in Southeast Asia, the chicken was primed to spread in several different directions. There's still some doubt in the archaeological record as to when chickens arrived where, but they were first in Southeast Asia before 6,000 BC, and then arrived in China a bit after 6,000 BC, and then in India sometime around 2000 BC. Of special note is that when humans took off in boats to settle the Pacific Islands, the only domesticated animal that was taken with them was the chicken. Chickens were taken by Polynesians all the way across the Pacific.

Evidence of chickens has been found on Easter Island, the most distant Polynesian outpost. More importantly, pre-Columbian chicken bones have been found in Chile, and there's a breed of chicken found in Chile known as the auacana which lays blue-green eggs. DNA analysis of the alacana shows that it came from the chickens that the Polynesians had. Likewise, sweet potatoes, which originated in South America, have been found in Polynesian sites as well. Chickens were part of the evidence that Polynesians had contact with early Americans. Chickens also kept spreading west. They arrived in the Middle East around 2000 BC.

and in Egypt around 1400 BC. Oddly enough, the primary purpose of chickens in ancient Egypt wasn't for eggs or meat. It was for cockfighting. Chickens made it to Europe around 800 BC and to sub-Saharan Africa sometime in the first millennium. The wide distribution of chickens meant that different breeding selections resulted in different varieties of chicken all over the world.

The original primary use for domesticated chickens was for eggs, similar to how cows used for dairy could provide a constant stream of calories without eliminating the cow, so too could a chicken provide a constant stream of eggs. Several hundred years after Egyptians began using chickens for cockfighting, they began to start breeding chickens extensively. They created the first incubators and developed a system for chicken breeding. The Egyptians called them the bird that gives birth every day. Likewise, chicken raising grew under the Romans. The Romans developed the omelet, and chickens became so popular that a law was passed in 171 BC that limited the number of chickens which could be served,

per meal to just one. When Rome fell, so did the popularity of chickens. In the Middle Ages, other fowls such as ducks and geese increased in popularity. Chickens were always around, but they weren't necessarily the most popular bird on the menu. When Europeans brought chickens to North America, they also weren't that popular at first because there were ample wild fowls such as geese, ducks, and turkey that were available. Here, I should note some things about chickens. Chickens are omnivores.

In fact, they are very serious omnivores. They will eat seeds, plants, bugs, frogs, mice, as well as eggs and even other chickens. On many farms, they serve a function similar to pigs in that they will eat almost any food scraps that they're given. Traditionally, chickens would be allowed to simply roam around most farms and they would peck and scratch for their food. They didn't necessarily need to be fed a special diet, and if they were fed something special, it was usually just grain or other leftovers. As most of you probably know, chickens can't fly like most birds. However, they can fly in limited bursts to get up over a fence or onto a tree branch. The world's record for the longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds,

and the longest distance is 301 feet or about 100 meters. While chickens were already global 2,000 years ago, they remained relatively unchanged until recently. For example, the average chicken at the beginning of the 20th century would lay about 100 eggs per year and a weight a little under a kilogram. If you look at a restaurant menu from the late 19th or early 20th centuries, chicken was usually the most expensive meat on the menu, the exact opposite of what it is today.

Chicken was considered a delicacy and something that was only eaten for special occasions, something closer to how Turkey is consumed in the United States today. Evidence of this came from a 1928 political ad for presidential candidate Herbert Hoover, which popularized the phrase, a chicken in every pot. The phrase, a chicken in every pot, actually dates back much earlier. It may have come from the French King Henry the 4th in the 16th century, who wanted the poor in his kingdom to have a chicken in their pot every Sunday. Efforts were made to try to selectively breed chickens to increase egg production. By 1926, chickens were able to produce up to 250 eggs per year.

The big change in the production and consumption of chicken began with the Second World War. Beef and other meats had been rationed in the United States, but chickens were something that many people could raise in their backyards. The total number of chickens in the United States exploded, and it became a much more popular meat than it was before the war, even though they were still mostly raised for eggs. After the war, when beef and pork rations were lifted, the largest grocery chain in the United States, Anne P, was concerned that people were going to eat less chicken. So in 1948, they launched a contest called the Chicken of Tomorrow. The goal was nothing less than to create a larger chicken. Its objective was described by the Saturday Evening Post as, quote, one bird chunky enough for the whole family.

A chicken with breast meat so thick you could carve it into steaks, with drumsticks that contain a minimum bone buried in layers of juicy dark meat, all costing less instead of more. End quote. 40 breeders sent in their cross-bred eggs to a judging facility in Delaware. They were grown and then judged on the basis of size. The winner was Charles Vantris of California. What a chicken that was a cross between a Cornish and a New Hampshire red,

and it was 40% larger than that. a normal chicken. The process of cross-breeding for larger, faster-growing chicken has continued for decades. For example, in 1957, the average weight of an adult chicken was 905 grams. In 1978, it had increased to 1,800 grams, and by 2005, it had reached 4,200 grams. That's a 364% increase in just 50 years. By the same note, the average number of eggs produced by a chicken can now reach over 300 per year. As chickens got larger, the breeding of chickens took off and the number of chickens raised annually exploded. It allowed for chickens to become a staple of fast food. A small restaurant started by a guy named Harlan Sanders in the 1930s called the Sanders Court and Cafe,

became a franchise restaurant in the 1950s called Kentucky Fried Chicken, or KFC. Today, there are over 27,000 KFC outlets worldwide, and it's the most popular chain of restaurants in Asia, with over 5,600 outlets in China alone. The popularity of KFC has also spawned many other chicken chains, such as Popeyes, Chick-fil-A, polloco, and wingstop. Per capita beef and pork consumption has dropped since 1965, whereas chicken consumption has more than tripled. There are now 50 billion chickens raised every year, making it the most numerous bird in

the world, domesticated or wild, by a wide margin. One of the downsides in the increase of the size of chickens and their industrial production is that they've lost much of their flavor which made them a delicacy in the first place. And this is true for both meat and eggs. Recently, there's been a revival in heritage breeds of chicken, which haven't been crossbred for size or growth. These chickens can often go for hundreds of dollars. This has been in conjunction with a trend towards the raising of free-range chickens. This allows chickens to eat a more natural, omnivorous diet.

It not only improves their quality, but it also gets them out of the cramped factory environment that it would otherwise be raised in. There's also been a renewed interest in raising chickens. More and more cities now allow for backyard chicken coops, although the numbers are usually limited, and they don't allow for roosters, which can be really noisy. Chickens are one of the rare things which have been around for thousands of years. They can be found in every country on Earth and on every continent except Antarctica.

Yet, despite their ancient origins, they are probably more important now than they have ever been before. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The associate producers are Thor Thomson and Peter Bennett. If you'd like to support the show, you can do so over at patreon.com. And remember, if you leave a review or send in a question, you two can have it read on the show.