What Was The First Bird To Be Domesticated?

Mostly everyone assumes that chickens were the first bird to be domesticated. But were they?

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Swan goose (Anser cygnoides). (CC BY SA)

It is often argued that taming wildlife and keeping them in captivity was our most consequential accomplishment because these animals provided a steady and secure source of critically important resources and services — meat, eggs, transportation, work, and more — to early humans. But, looking back, we often don’t know for certain when or where the first wild animals were domesticated.

Take birds, for example: Poultry — domesticated birds that are raised for their meat, eggs and feathers — are the most commonly farmed animals. Of these, chickens, Gallus gallus domesticus, currently account for approximately 92.9% of the world’s poultry, and they are at least five times more commonly farmed than are any mammalian livestock. This global preponderance of chickens makes many people assume that chickens were the first bird species to be domesticated. And they do have an ancient history. For example, chicken bones have been discovered that date from between the third and second millennium BC, whereas geese, turkeys, and peafowl have been found from the second millennium BC; and ducks and pigeons from the first millennium BC (ref & ref). But the history of when and where domestication of particular poultry occurred is highly controversial and not reliably documented.

A recently published study by a team of Japanese and Chinese scientists looked at domestication of the goose. Although China produces roughly 90% of the world’s domesticated geese, this is a very minor poultry species, whose numbers combined with guinea fowl comprise just 1.3% of all domesticated poultry, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization (or FAO; more here).

This study is very rigorous, employing a variety of methods — histological, geochemical, biochemical, and morphological — to examine 232 ancient goose bones to determine when geese may have first been domesticated. The bones in this study were unearthed at the Tianluoshan archaeological site, which is a Stone Age settlement in the lower Yangtze River valley of China, occupied by rice farmers and hunter-gatherers between 7,000 and 5,500 years ago (Figure 1).