Folk medicine uses of melanotic Asiatic chickens as evidence of early diffusion to the New World.

Abstract

Abstract Black-boned, black-skinned and black-meated chickens of many feather types and colors originated in Southeast Asia; the Southern Chinese, especially, used it in their folk medicine in ancient times. Many uses of this same Asiatic-type, melanotic chicken (BB-BMC) are currently shared by Mayan language groups in Latin America. The arbitrariness of the cures, most of which relate to illnesses considered to be induced by witchcraft, linked with a distinctive biological entity BB-BMC indicates that the assemblage of traits qualifies it as valid for testing the diffusion model. I have found that Amerinds in Mayan language groups possess many more of these folk medicine traits than Amerinds in other language and cultural groups. Away from the Mayan hearth in Guatemala, fewer Chinese like medicinal traits are found; but the fact that the intervening cultures effectively lack knowledge of cures with BB-BMC suggests presence of the cures prior to the dispersal and separation of Maya speakers. The BB-BMC's presence from the Mexican-U.S. border to Southern Chile indicates that the lack of folkloric medicine using BB-BMC is not associated with its absence but with the lack of a belief system related to it. Since belief systems of these types have to be carefully taught, a connection with the peoples of what is now Southern China or Southeast Asia was likely in pre-Columbian times. Certainly the early Iberians with their fear of the Inquisition and of becoming bewitched on board ships would not have allowed BB-BMCs and curers on their vessels. They had to have arrived earlier from Asia, since chickens were given as gifts to Spaniards by the 1520s–1540s on contact in several places in North and South America.