SoylentNews

upstart [soylentnews.org] writes:

████ # This file was generated bot-o-matically! Edit at your own risk. ████

upstart [soylentnews.org] writes in with an IRC submission:

The chicken first crossed the road in Southeast Asia, ‘landmark’ gene study finds [sciencemag.org]:

It is the world’s most common farm animal as well as humanity’s largest single source of animal protein. Some 24 billion strong, it outnumbers all other birds by an order of magnitude. Yet for 2 centuries, biologists have struggled to explain how the chicken became the chicken.

Now, the first extensive study of the bird’s full genome concludes that people in northern Southeast Asia or southern China domesticated a colorful pheasant sometime after about 7500 B.C.E. Migrants and traders then carried the bird across Asia and on to every continent except Antarctica.

“Our results contradict previous claims that chickens were domesticated in northern China and the Indus Valley,” researchers led by Ming-Shan Wang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Kunming Institute of Zoology write in a paper published today in Cell Research. They also found that the modern chicken’s chief ancestor is a subspecies of red jungle fowl named Gallus gallus spadiceus.

“This is obviously a landmark study,” says Dorian Fuller, an archaeologist at University College London who was not involved in the effort. He adds that the results could shed light on the emergence of agriculture and early trade networks, and what features of the bird made it so attractive to people.

Charles Darwin argued the chicken descended from the red jungle fowl because the birds resemble each other and can make fertile offspring; he speculated that domestication happened in India. But five varieties of the pheasant inhabit a broad arc extending from the jungles of Indonesia to the Himalayan foothills of Pakistan. Which variety led to the chicken, and where, was uncertain. Based on presumed chicken bones, archaeologists claimed, variously, that people domesticated the bird 9000 years ago in northern China and 4000 years ago in Pakistan.

DNA studies promised to resolve the issue, but researchers had few samples from the bird’s wild relatives. So Jianlin Han, a geneticist at the Joint Laboratory on Livestock and Forage Genetic Resources, embarked on a 20-year project to sample indigenous village chickens [sciencemag.org] and wild jungle fowl [sciencemag.org] near more than 120 villages across Asia and Africa.

How to contact the news team [sciencemag.org]

• Graduate programs drop GRE after online version raises concerns about fairness [sciencemag.org]
• Lawsuit alleges scientific misconduct at U.S. nuclear weapons lab [sciencemag.org]
• COVID-19 cancels charity galas and walks. Science is paying the price [sciencemag.org]
• ‘It’s a nightmare.’ How Brazilian scientists became ensnared in chloroquine politics [sciencemag.org]
• ‘Has it peaked? I don’t know.’ NIH official details foreign influence probe [sciencemag.org]

More ScienceInsider [sciencemag.org]

• Vast ring of deep shafts found near Stonehenge [sciencemag.org]
• Three dozen alien civilizations may be advanced enough to communicate with us [sciencemag.org]
• Rodent brains reveal triggers of hibernation [sciencemag.org]
• Earth’s species disappearing at an alarming rate [sciencemag.org]
• Watch an example of chimpanzee ‘culture,’ as one fishes for termites [sciencemag.org]

More Sifter [sciencemag.org]

Original Submission