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Foxy Facts: Chickens Archaeological studies suggest that without ancient farmers growing rice and different grains, chickens may not ever have existed. It ’ s been revealed that chickens may have been domesticated thousands of years later than scientists thought. A well known person said that chickens descended from a red jungle fowl which was a many colored tropical bird from the pheasant family, because the two appeared so much the same. But proving him right has been difficult. Five varieties of jungle birds ranged from India to Northern China. Small chicken bones were also rare in fossil sites. In 2020, a study of 863 living chickens confirmed that the jungle birds were indeed the ancestors of the living chickens.
Researchers have found fossils of early chickens that date back eight thousand to eleven thousand years ago in Northern China and Pakistan. But the genetics of living birds could not narrow the time of domestication. The oldest bones belonging to chickens came from a site in Central Thailand, where farmers grew rice and grains. The growing of these grains drew birds to the fields where they made nests at the edge of the planted fields and were able to get familiar to people. Scientists traced the trail of chicken bones across Asia into the Middle East and Africa. Domestic chickens appeared ab out three thousand years ago in the Northern China and India and about two thousand eight hundred years ago in the Middle East and Northeast Africa. The first chickens in Europe were found in Italy two thousand eight hundred years ago and it was another one thousand years before chickens were introduced in to Britian.
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