Why did the Chicken Cross the Road? Chickens and Forgotten History

if you look outside your window on a nice spring day you might assume that Robins and sparrows are the most numerous birds in the world but no not even close or could it be say pigeons or seagulls again not even close if you looked it up you might find note of the red-billed quail a weaver bird of sub-saharan Africa that occurs in astounding numbers and whose population is estimated to exceed a billion and it still it is not the most numerous bird on earth if you even went back in time to the passenger pigeon the most numerous wild species ever found to add its height had a population estimated to exceed five billion it would not even come close to the most numerous bird on earth today Dallas Dallas domesticus and how the bird that most of us simply know as the chicken came to be the most numerous bird on earth is history that deserves to be remembered the exact story of the domestication of the chicken is not completely clear as domesticated birds have interbred with wild birds the DNA story is muddled most scholars agree that the chicken was domesticated from the wild red jungle fowl member of the pheasant family that still exists in large parts of Southeast Asia today although the species is threatened by hybridization with domestic chickens however genes of a similar gray jungle fowl found on the Indian subcontinent continent have been identified in modern breeds of domesticated chicken as well leading some scientists to suggest the chickens may have been domesticated in multiple domestication events in areas of South Asia and China the domestication might have occurred as far back as eight to ten thousand years ago and from Asia domesticated chickens spread to the Middle East Africa where chickens had an advantage of her local guinea fowl who had the tendency to fly away Europe and Oceania while chickens were only thought to have come to the Americas after contact with Europe there is some evidence that there were chickens in South America in the pre-columbian era supporting the still somewhat controversial theory that there was contact in the Americas with Polynesian people's surprisingly most scientists agree that the original domestic a chickens was done for the purpose of cockfighting not for eggs or meat male chickens called have a natural aggression towards one another and have a sharp spur on their heel that they used to attack chickens bred for the purpose of fighting are called Gamecocks and are selected for strength and stamina fights are sometimes used as a form of ritual sacrifice and fighting represent fur ility the sport which often included wagering alongside religious and cultural elements spread from the Indus Valley to Greece and Rome and is depicted in ancient mosaics the fighting chickens would be placed in a shallow depression that would serve as their ring where they would find and that was called a cockpit as the controls of a ship where the pilot might steer the ship were often placed in an open well on the deck it resembled the cockpit and so came to be known as the cockpit and then that term which refers to where the controls of the vessel are was eventually carried over to aircraft where the spot that controlled the aircraft was called a cockpit also to racecars although now banned in many parts of the world the sport continues both legally and illegally throughout the world it might be the world's oldest continuously played sport despite this use the utility of domesticated chickens as a food source is obvious they produce food both in the form of eggs and meat they require relatively few resources to maintain foraging readily on insects and food scraps they are poor fliers and relatively easily confined and protected cages at night they are easily portable of boats and ships and relative to larger domesticated animals they provide a single meal rather than leaving the problem of safely storing the excess food whence a slobbering a cow or a goat eggs are also easier to preserve and transport than milk relative to wild birds domesticated chickens are less aggressive grow larger and produce larger eggs earlier and more frequently if chickens were domesticated for the purpose of cockfighting it is clear that the domesticated breeds were developed as a source of food chickens came somewhat late to Egypt given its long history but Egypt produced a new technology in chicken cultivation that awed the ancient world egg ink Bader's so significant that they were mentioned by Aristotle who incorrectly suppose that the incubation was done by burying the eggs in dung the Egyptians were reportedly protective of the secrets of their incubation ovens which allowed chickens to be produced faster and more reliably if hens are used to incubate eggs using the natural process the hen will stop laying for a period but if the eggs are instead removed and artificially incubated the hen will produced more eggs and queue bathers also allow chickens to be incubated year-round whereas chickens in colder climates could not generally keep eggs warm enough to produce chicks in the winter months despite Europeans knowing of the Egyptian incubators and the time of the ancient Greeks the operation of the ovens which set the eggs in baskets at a chamber below a higher chamber where a smoldering fire was maintained was not clearly understood and described by Europeans until French science scientists Rene Antoine Prashad de ray Muir gained access to the ovens and described their methods in 1750 the process required skilled handlers who maintained the fires and turned the eggs wood is relatively rare in Egypt so these smouldering fires kept in dome-shaped chambers allowed smoke to escape while keeping rain out usually used the more common Egyptian fuel of dried dung which was likely the genesis of Aristotle's misconception about the eggs being buried and Don Herschel produced his own design for an egg incubator but the colder European climates favoured required more robust fuel and a practical modern egg incubator was not invented until coal lamp incubators were perfected in the 1800s chickens and eggs were popular in ancient Rome where the omelet was invented at one point the fattening of chickens was prohibited in Rome and the eating of chicken limited to one per meal in order to preserve supplies of wheat the response was to invent the cape on castrated rooster which can grow up to twice it's normal size chicken was one of the more common proteins in medieval Europe where larger animals could be prohibitively expensive while chickens were relatively inexpensive to acquire and keep but archaeologists noted a significant increase in chicken bones in the archaeological record starting about 900 to 1000 AD historians have proposed a number of reasons for the sudden increase in chicken consumption in the medieval period including increasing urbanization and standards of living but the largest driving factor may have been religious practice Benedictine monks of the period started enforcing rules around religious fasting that included a prescription against the meat of four-legged animals but which allowed the meat of birds and eggs as there were at the time around 130 fasting days a year in common Christian practice chicken and eggs quickly grew in popularity as favorite proteins in fact an Oxford University study in 2017 of chicken bones from the high medieval period found that their DNA was rapidly altering during the period as people were selecting for larger less aggressive species that produce more and larger eggs and thus Christian feasting practices in Europe literally changed the very genetic structure of domesticated chickens and if it seems strange that religion affected chickens understand that the symbolic importance of chickens was not at all new as previously mentioned cockfighting had both religious and cultural elements but the symbolism of chickens goes much farther than that eggs were a symbol of fertility in the coming of spring in pagan rituals long before the tradition of hiding Easter eggs was described by Christians as being symbolic of Jesus's emergence from the tomb and resurrection the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism saw the crowing rooster is symbolic of a turning point in the cosmic struggle between dark and light on the Chinese zodiac people born in the year of the rooster supposed to be perfectionists who are critical yoga tist achill but also practical loyal and organized in Norse mythology three roosters crowing signaled the coming of Ragnarok the end of times and multiple religions use roosters in divination a practice called electro-man see in the Japanese Shinto religion the Roosters associated with the goddess Amaterasu goddess of the Sun in universe Islam considers the rooster one of the three voices that are beloved by Allah saying when you hear the crowing of ask for Allah's blessing for they have seen an angel the Gospels of the Christian New Testament tell the story of Jesus's of Jesus telling Peter that before the rooster crows you will deny me three times thus the rooster can be seen as nefarious but as the rooster crowing led Peter to repent it is also seen as a symbol of grace and forgiveness the rooster is therefore the symbol of st. Peter and in the ninth century Pope Nicholas the first decreed that a rooster should be placed atop all churches as a reminder of Peters denial of Christ not only does the rooster still adorn the top of many European churches but Nicholas's decree started the tradition of placing roosters on weathervanes chickens and their behavior become intimately connected to culture and have permeated language the Khalsa when a chicken is to call them a coward term that may date back to the 14th century versions of the story about the chicken named Chicken Little or Henny Penny referring to a character who mistakenly believes a disaster is imminent go back as much as 25 centuries chicken feed is an idiom going back to the 19th century that means up poultry song a politician promising prosperity may promise a chicken in every pot a phrase that while used in the 1928 US presidential campaign actually dates back at least to English King Henry the fourth if a person's bad deeds come back to them it is said that their chickens have come home to roost and if the flavor of an unusual food is difficult to describe it is said to taste like chicken if something is crooked it is cockeyed if a man cannot defend himself from a sharp tongued wife he is said to be henpecked a reference to the fact that chickens themselves will establish an order within their community that is called a pecking order itself a term that is applied to any recognition of status within a group a particularly attentive mother or matronly figure is called a mother hen and if that woman is depressed that her children have grown she is said to have empty nest syndrome a leader who bullies people is called the of the walk referring to a fighting chicken whose pen was called a walk if you are barely making enough money to make ends meet you are like a chicken scratching out a living and if you're able to set some aside then that is your nest egg and if you can set quite a lot of side then you are feathering your nest if you place too much faith in one investment you are putting all your eggs in one basket and if you're planning how to spend investment before it produces returns you are counting your eggs before they are hatched if something is particularly difficult to find it is as scarce as hen's teeth and if it gets away it has flown the coop and for letting it go you might be called a birdbrain if a person is particularly irascible they may be called hard-boiled and if they are disorganized they are running around like a chicken with its head cut off if they back out on a promise they are said to chicken out and a person who does that might be by some called a bad egg and if they've seen better days they might say that they are no spring chicken when putting a plan into motion you're hatching an idea and if the plan succeeds you have something to crow about but if that plan fails you might wind up with egg on your face if something makes you particularly angry and you can't let it go it is stuck in your craw the story cannot be believed is a cock-and-bull story if you're in need of a joke try asking why did the chicken cross the road and if you want to befuddle someone ask them which came first the chicken or the egg as food chicken is among the most ubiquitous Foods in the world part of almost any cuisine that includes meat worldwide some 55 million chickens are eaten every day but that was not always the case in 19th century American chickens were mostly used for eggs making chicken is a meat rare used for special occasions and papered by the rich discovery of a way to synthesize vitamin D in the 1920s improved chicken production as it allowed chickens to thrive during winter and improvements in breeding increased production through the 1930s eventually large-scale production vastly increased the amount of chicken available during the Second World War meat and cheese were rationed in the United States who was not only providing for its vastly expanded military but helping to serve the needs of allies and liberated countries devastated by war however poultry eggs and fresh milk were not rationed and consumption of poultry skyrocketed in America in the 1990s chicken surpassed beef is the most popular meat in Europe launch into the fears of bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease and in the United States as drought had reduced beef stock and driven up prices versus poultry in 2015 Americans in average of 92 pounds of chicken per person a year a record and the country produced about 90 billion eggs the worldwide trend is nothing short of extraordinary Eric Dorfman director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh did some math based on statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and determined that in 2016 some 66 billion chickens were produced in the world nearly nine for every human on earth just as shocking however is that just 55 years earlier in 1961 that number was just seven point four billion chickens or about one chicken for every 400 people on earth and while chicken and poultry production faces certain obstacles including questions of food safety and treatment of the animals especially in the industrialized setting chicken is going to continue to be a larger and larger part of the human food supply chicken is a relatively healthy form of protein with relatively lower amounts of saturated fat than alternatives and including important nutrients like the antioxidant selenium chicken is also relatively efficient to produce it takes about 2 pounds of feed to produce a pound of chicken whereas it takes about 7 pounds of feed to produce a pound of beef and 3 pounds of feed to produce a pound of pork and chicken and eggs also release relatively low amounts of co2 per gram of protein and if chicken is going to continue to be a big part of humanity's future it is a surprising part of the world's passed in 2007 scientists were able to determine the chemical composition of proteins that were found inside a 68 million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex bone and what they found was and I quote remarkably similar to chickens suggesting that chickens are the animal on this earth that is most similar to the Tyrannosaurus Rex and of course suggesting that Tyrannosaurus Rex tasted like chicken I hope you enjoyed this episode of the history guy short snippets of forgotten history between 10 and 15 minutes long if you did enjoy please go ahead and click that thumbs up button if you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future episodes please write those in the comment section I will be happy to personally respond be sure to follow the history guy on Facebook Instagram Twitter and check out our merchandise on teespring com and if you'd like more episodes on forgotten history all you need to do is subscribe [Music]

Channel: The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered

Views: 507,704

Rating: 4.9690495 out of 5

Keywords: history, the history guy, chicken, trivia, poultry, history guy

Id: O7dAG4T-5h4

Length: 16min 2sec (962 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Str0ngTr33]

And religious fasting, since it allowed for eggs, is the reason for modern G. gallus's larger eggs!

[u/0xD153A53]

Ever stick your hand in a compost pile? I'd assume the inside of a dung heap would actually be pretty warm, as it biologically breaks down.

[u/RaboTrout]

It's amazing how hilariously wrong the greeks were at almost everything. Geometry and Algebra notwithstanding.