Move over, chickens—there’s a new candidate for oldest domesticated poultry, and it says, “honk!”
Humans have long raised birds in order to consume their meat and eggs, and use their feathers. Discovering the history of avian domestication reveals how human society slowly transitioned from hunting and gathering to farming. While chickens are usually thought to have been the first domesticated fowl some 5,000 years ago, a study has got ornithologists atwitter, suggesting that a Chinese village bred and raised geese 2,000 years earlier.
To come to this conclusion, scientists flocked to a Stone Age site in southern China, where they collected and analyzed 232 goose bones. Carbon dating showed that the bones were 7,000 years old. Might these have been wild birds who simply happened to be hunted in the area? Not likely, the scientists say, because despite the age of the poultry bones, they furnish plenty of evidence to the discerning scientific eye.
First, chemical analysis revealed that the geese drank local water and might have eaten local paddy rice. Second, the birds’ bones were all of similar sizes, suggesting that the geese were similar in size, too. Third, some of the bones were from geese too young to migrate, and it’s unlikely that there were wild geese breeding in southern China at the time. All this suggests captive breeding: the geese were hatched locally, and then fed extensively, penned, and stripped of wing feathers.
Despite the study’s findings, questions remain. What geese species do these bones belong to? How did goose domestication spread? More research of our ancient, feathered friends remains to be done.
