The Surprising Ways That Chickens Changed the World For most of us, the word chicken spells a cold, clammy slab of plastic-wrapped white meat plucked out of the refrigerated section of our local supermarket. But in the ancient world, and in many cultures today, chickens had deep religious and social significance. Speaking from his home in North Carolina, Andrew Lawler, author of Why Did the Chicken Cross the World: The Epic Saga of the Bird That Powers Civilization describes how fried chicken has its origins in West Africa, why the Puritans tried to ban the word cock, and how the backyard chicken movement is bringing roosters to towns and cities all over America. Andrew, you know what my first question has to be: Why did the chicken cross the world? The answers actually quite simple. The chicken crossed the world because we took it with us. Humans cant do without chickens. Chicken is the most popular meat today. Americans eat more than 80 pounds a year, more than pork or beef. So we tend to think people must have domesticated the chicken because it was good to eat, right? Well, no. Scientists now believe chickens were not domesticated to eat in the first place. Every chicken you see on Earth is the descendant of the red jungle fowl, a very shy jungle bird that lives in south Asia, all the way from Pakistan to Sumatra and Indonesia. Its a small, pheasant-like bird hunters like because its very hard to find, so it poses a great challenge. The strange thing is that these birds are so shy that when theyre captured in the wild, they can die of a heart attack because theyre so terrified of humans. So the question is, How did this bird, that is incredibly shy, become the most ubiquitous bird on Earth? You suggest that the evolution of the chicken has powered human civilization—thats a pretty big claim. Justify it. It is a big claim, and I would not have made it when I first started looking into the chicken. Like most people, I thought of it as a bird that provides us with meat and eggs but not much else. But when I started to dig into it, I discovered that the chicken has actually played more roles across human history, in more societies, than any other animal, and I include the dog and the cat and cows and pigs. The chicken is a kind of a zelig of human history, which pops up in all kinds of different societies. If you go back to ancient Babylon, about 800 B.C., in what is now Iraq, you find seals used by people to identify themselves. Some of these have images of chickens sitting on top of columns being worshipped by priests. That expanded with the Persian Empire. Zoroastrians considered the chicken sacred because it crowed before dawn, before the light appeared. And in Zoroastrian tradition, the coming of the light is a sign of good. So the chicken became associated with an awakening from physical, as well as spiritual, slumber.
Posted on: Tue, 23 Dec 2014 10:31:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015