The earliest farmers of northwest China exploited grain-fed pheasants not chickens

Loukas Barton,Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan,Ariane Thomas,Brian M Kemp,Cara Monroe,Brittany Bingham

doi:10.1038/s41598-020-59316-5

Loukas Barton, Krithivasan Sankaranarayanan + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-59316-5

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Abstract

Though chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus) are globally ubiquitous today, the timing, location, and manner of their domestication is contentious. Until recently, archaeologists placed the origin of the domestic chicken in northern China, perhaps as early as 8,000 years ago. Such evidence however complicates our understanding of how the chicken was domesticated because its wild progenitor – the red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus) – lives in tropical ecosystems and does not exist in northern China today or in the recent past. Increasingly, multiple lines of evidence suggest that many of the archaeological bird remains underlying this northern origins hypothesis have been misidentified. Here we analyze the mitochondrial DNA of some of the earliest purported chickens from the Dadiwan site in northern China and conclude that they are pheasants (Phasianus colchicus). Curiously, stable isotope values from the same birds reveal that their diet was heavy in agricultural products (namely millet), meaning that they lived adjacent to or among some of the earliest farming communities in East Asia. We suggest that the exploitation of these baited birds was an important adaptation for early farmers in China’s arid north, and that management practices like these likely played a role in the domestication of animals – including the chicken – in similar contexts throughout the region.

Highlights

Northern China is one of the few places where agriculture evolved independently ca. 9,000-7,000 calibrated years before the present and with a suite of plant and animal domesticates unique to the region, namely Panicum and Setaria millets, pigs, dogs, and a medium-size bird most typically identified as chicken[1,2]
Chinese archaeological contexts that contain other evidence for agricultural life, often contain bones of medium-sized birds identified as “chicken,” the oldest of which have been touted as the epicenter of chicken domestication. This is problematic because some of the oldest locations are in the arid regions of northern China where the wild ancestor of the domestic chicken - the tropically adapted “red jungle fowl” (Gallus gallus) - does not thrive today[12]
All DNA extraction and pre-polymerase chain reaction (PCR) procedures were conducted in the ancient DNA cleanroom at the Laboratories of Molecular Anthropology and Microbiome Research (LMAMR; lmamr. org) at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK

Summary

Introduction

Northern China is one of the few places where agriculture evolved independently ca. 9,000-7,000 calibrated years before the present (cal BP) and with a suite of plant and animal domesticates unique to the region, namely Panicum and Setaria millets, pigs, dogs, and a medium-size bird most typically identified as chicken[1,2]. 9,000-7,000 calibrated years before the present (cal BP) and with a suite of plant and animal domesticates unique to the region, namely Panicum and Setaria millets, pigs, dogs, and a medium-size bird most typically identified as chicken[1,2]. The causes of this agricultural revolution are the subject of much debate[3,4,5], as is the direct evidence for it[6]. Because the eight specimens come from eight unique depositional contexts and two completely different prehistoric cultural components (separated by ~900 years), initially we assumed them to represent eight different individuals

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