Why the Chicken Got Domesticated | Sam O'Nella | A History Teacher Reacts

and her memory means so much to me but if the bills keep coming in like this i'm not sure my family will be able to handle it well hey man you know what this is too serious don't put all your eggs in one casket let's just hope she doesn't get egg zoomed i'm sorry don't ever contact me or my kids ever again i understand anyway that's all for today hey youtube welcome back to another history teacher axe video mr terry's i continue my search for historical knowledge found here on the internet all right today's video was chosen by our patrons they want to see more salmonella and they chose this week for why the chicken got domesticated all right other than chickens are delicious maybe there's more to it all right anyway so we'll check out what uh these humans in the in the words of diogenes would uh would call um why they got domesticated um if you don't know that joke go to the diogenes video um and you'll see what you see what we're talking about all right the original video link is down below be sure to sort sam give him the view like subscription uh make sure we love his stuff because we want him back it's been a while since he put out some videos maybe he's taking a break i don't know but i'm sure if we can keep his videos popular keep that support coming maybe maybe even more likely then he comes back and i know we all want that all right if you'd like to join a patreon uh the link is down below lets you vote on videos and have a little bit more influence on the channel but thank you for being here regardless make sure you sub i know a lot of you watching don't necessarily sub it helps the channel a lot give it the like thumbs up if you want to see more of this stuff but regardless thank you for being here and let's go ahead and get started one all right tell us about chickens i'm actually interested in this you know chickens is the way they exist there's no way they could have been a creature that the way that they exist today would have ever survived in the wild a flightless bird right never work has to be heavily heavily influenced by uh humans let's check this out hi kids hey kids whenever i browse this site i see more and more videos of people talking about things like youtuber drama the election world politics and it made me okay i i know i'm not like people talking about things like youtuber i'm not a big youtuber and they talk about youtube drama what what what what is youtube drama okay i don't know who that guy is the election i know that guy's politics i don't know who that guy is and it made me think hey maybe i should start covering more relevant nuance topics in my videos yeah anyway let's talk about chickens so the story of the chicken begins a long time ago in southeast asia now this area had a ton of bamboo growing all over the place and the thing about bamboo is it follows a very specific life cycle where once every 50 years or so every bamboo plant in a given region will blossom at the exact same time then shortly whoa why every 50 years well how long does a bamboo plant last as much as other trees generally do but like every 50 years okay i need a botanist can we get a botanist here uh talk in the comments about why this happens what the heck so every bamboo plant in a given region will blossom at the exact same with what then shortly after they litter the whole area with these little seeds known as bamboo rice or as i call them bambinos these pellets get planted the current bamboo dies out and the cycle starts over okay so they have a 50-year life cycle at the very end they just explode out all their dna i guess and uh that's boring and that thing is going to be edible get planted the current bamboo dies out and the cycle starts over now enter the ancestor of the domesticated chicken known as the red jungle fowl the jungle fowl lived in the same area okay why did we get out of why did we get away from that oh like you want a jungle fowl sandwich not a chicken sandwich jungle fowl sandwich there he has the bamboo and as you can imagine they got a lot of benefit out of being literally knee-deep in food once every half century so much so that evolution basically said all right yeah food supply is good i want you to just start pumping out babies like there's no tomorrow that way we can take as much advantage of each bloom as possible as a result sure so i mean we talk about this in like my history classes of course um and i it happens with the animal kingdom too an increase of food supply will always mean an increase in population it just it's what happens um when when more animals can more animals humans whatever can eat more they're healthier and specifically if there's an abundance of food what it means is that there's a much much reduced risk of famine which historically speaking is kind of one of the leading causes of death is famine because of how fragile really agriculture can be and this isn't even necessary agriculture because it's not intentional but um how fragile food supplies are right especially in in older times so more food equals more people in the same case is happening here especially if it's easily obtainable by a lot of different animals if chickens you know i'm assuming had more of a an ability to be able to protect themselves and and stuff like that than the modern version which would just get eaten up in in the wild but still maybe not nearly as a an animal with as many survival skills as other kind of wild animals but if they can eat as well and not be you know basically pushed into extinction then you're going to have an explosion here so okay but like they're saying here though there's obviously a cycle because 50 years is a long time and i don't know again what they mean by all of them at the same time just because that's how it started that way you'd think it would be it wouldn't be so far apart um because then i guess you'd be saying that the the the bamboo all started at the same time therefore it ended at the same time don't know how that works so the chicken population became synchronized with the bamboo shooting up during blooms and dwindling in between then humans showed up and they saw this pattern and they said wow how bamboozly and then they realized wait a minute that pun was dumb but also we can harness this whole chicken cycle thing all we have to do is give these guys a whole bunch of food and we can make their reproductive systems go into overdrive do you know what that means lots of hot bird porn no it means we get as many eggs as we could ever dream of so with a bit of work we managed to investigate the chicken around 5000 bc and as you can imagine the idea yes i love the they got a little they got little little leashes sheen around the house was extremely popular leading to the chicken spreading across the entirety of the civilized world over the course of a few millennia i think it's interesting that despite the fact that the west has had chickens for most of its history it wasn't until way later that we figured out where they came from let me get your history lesson though of course you know animals in in eurasia okay and and we should add um africa into this because the geography is such where the the the latitude the prime latitude right of of society especially in ancient times is around oh 20 degrees north or so basically this line if you can see my mouse cutting through here china indus valley civilization mesopotamia china all basically developed in a very similar latitude and what that means is that there are going to be similar shared climates similar shared season lengths because because they're on the same latitude so equal amount of sunlight through the year what that means is more than anywhere else in the world as opposed to like the americas food and animals can uh can can thrive in a huge uh territory right um because again a an animal that's going to live pretty well in much of china might do very well in northern india much more than moving north this house so you see a lot more east to west movement of animals and plants than you do north south because when you go north south you're changing latitudes and climates vary a lot more north south and they do east-west that's why i like the americas you don't see this huge sharing of different plants and animals not one just one because there's not a lot native to there but because the climates vary a lot more so a chicken you know especially if it's gonna be very productive is gonna easily be able to be spread to europe um western asia and africa the civilized world over the course of a few millennia i think it's interesting that despite the fact that the west has had chickens for most of its history it wasn't until way later that we figured out where they came from like all right man yeah it's time to delve into the world of the unknown we're gonna see things the likes of which man has never laid eyes upon before i put okay sorry the bar down there is you can still see it i put two way i put way too much effort into this background for some reason so you efforts better appreciate it do you guys appreciate it i hope you do because i mean yeah for for sam you know he doesn't he doesn't have the deep art styles it's pretty it's pretty simple stuff that's not why we come here but i mean yeah this is this is high brow stuff this is we just might make it out of here alive hey uh is this this year's no weird what the hell of course constantly supercharged uterus yeah without its drawbacks after all the chicken essentially goes through its entire menstrual cycle every day so the next time you're really friends complaining about how bad her period is get her a box of chocolates and be generally attentive to her name oh jeez you prick now anything with that kind of menstrual strike cycle um because one of the things that makes a domesticated animal worthy of being domesticated is the ability for it to reproduce quickly right it's why for example you know among multiple reasons why an elephant which could be you know an amazing domesticated animal is not very good because it has um uh uh just uh has a um it takes you know their pregnancies for example they take way longer than humans what is it like 20 months or something correct me if i'm wrong but it's way longer and the fact that they mature very slowly so an animal is a is most productive of course if you contain it and stuff but it has a short pregnancies and can start giving birth within months or maybe a year or so of their of their existence and it looks like china they're uh the chickens coming out that came out of china here are perfect for that with chickens and most other egg-laying critters is that they only have one hole in their pelvic region which is called a cloaca i think or the butt cloaker so the croatia basically acts like a funnel taking all the eggs and waste and sending it down the same chute and while this might sound convenient at first there is one fatal disadvantage that affects chickens in particular sometimes the egg can get stuck on its way out leading to a condition known as egg binding and since this means nothing can exit the clamato anymore the egg bound chicken ends up dying of constipation over the course of a couple days so this the way the way they've developed it it it it looks like the chicken it has to have humans to tend it because they're going to have to um be able to to remedy those hey jerry how you doing uh not good oh man what's wrong it's just ever since jenny got egg bound things have been so stressful her funeral expenses are through the roof and her memory means so much to me but if the bills keep coming in like this i'm not sure my family will be able to handle it well hey man you know what this is too serious don't put all your eggs in one casket let's just hope she doesn't get egg zoomed i'm sorry don't ever contact me or my kids ever again i understand anyway that's all for today till next time well done sam and thank you for watching all right let's talk about it all right so that's the story of the domestication of the chicken that's great i i find the the the early histories of plants and animals and how they kind of came to be a really fascinating thing because nothing we eat both plant and animal based is in its current form as anything like it was in its original form right it took thousands of years of human experimentation to get plants and animals to be the productive things that they are today and again look at look at the animals that we eat um they i mean you look at them they're not animals that could survive in the wild and didn't look like that they wouldn't have been able to like a cow would you know a chicken those things would never survive in the wild and then again the plants we eat too a lot of them just started as like weeds and then through cultivation and the better seeds become more nutritious and larger yields and all that but it's hard to know the history of these things because so much of this happened before recorded history meaning you know the first person to domesticate the chicken didn't write it down their process but something we have to look i mean i don't know honestly how they how they know exactly about these things but it's interesting to know i just need to learn more about it so but i do find it fascinating because it's an integral part of the human history is the domestication of plants and animals i mean it's what changed humans into what we are now i mean we look at population growth and technological growth through the history of of humankind i mean it goes on you know thousands of years hundreds of thousands of years millions if you want to get back and then it just skyrockets completely with technological and agricultural advancements population growth happens pretty much at that point when plants and animals became domesticated you look at a population chart just explodes want that once that happens and it's interesting part of history and i think it's it's uh hopefully we can study it more because again it is fascinating all right with that awesome job of sam good funny stuff there thanks patrons for picking this and again make sure you support sam the link is down below to this original video support that let's get him back here on the internet all right with that we'll see you next time bye [Music] you

Channel: Mr. Terry History

Views: 117,372

Keywords: react, history, chicken

Id: puMagmFxjVA

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Tue May 25 2021