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When the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain decided to give about $3 million to a number of academic figures, including Greger Larson, to study the “Cultural & Scientific Perceptions of Human-Chicken Interactions,” the grant caught the eye of someone at The Daily Mail, in England.
Dr. Larson, a professor at Oxford, who is also overseeing a major project on dog evolution, did not laugh.
As he noted recently, the staggering number of chickens in the world — 20 billion or so — is reason enough to study them. And although it may be hard to believe, it seems that neither potpie nor chicken Parmesan was the reason humans domesticated them.
Related on the SLP
Today, chickens are just behind pigs and poised to overtake them as the most common source of animal protein in the world. But before the raising of chickens became industrial, they were far less important to human diets, and for thousands of years, their primary role seems to have been in cockfighting or various rituals. Estimates of the time of their domestication are from 7,000 to 10,000 years ago, but a recent report from an archaeological dig in Israel concluded that they were first eaten in significant numbers about 2,200 years ago.
Read full, original post: Chickens Weren’t Always Dinner for Humans
