![Figure][1] CREDIT: COURTESY OF THE AMERIND FOUNDATION INC Mesoamericans have been credited with introducing domesticated turkeys to North America sometime after 200 B.C.E. But a genetic study suggests that people in what is now the southwestern United States tamed turkeys on their own. The history of the turkey, one of the few animals to be domesticated in the New World, has been complicated by wars, diseases, Spanish turkey traffic, and even 20th century wild turkey–release programs. To untangle the turkey story, Brian Kemp, a molecular anthropologist at Washington State University, Pullman, and colleagues tested turkey DNA from a variety of sources: 38 southwestern archaeological sites dated from 200 B.C.E. to 1800 C.E., 10 museum specimens of extinct Mesoamerican wild turkeys, 12 grocery store turkeys, and almost 300 turkey sequences in the GenBank database. The southwestern turkeys were only distantly related to the Mesoamerican birds, suggesting that the Puebloans didn't inherit their domesticated turkeys from the Mesoamericans, the team reported online last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Furthermore, the Puebloans didn't go after local birds to tame, but preferred those from the eastern and midwestern United States—perhaps because of their superior feathers. The finding validates a 1980 proposal by ethnozoologist Charmion McKusick of the former Southwest Bird Laboratory in Globe, Arizona, who based her analysis on turkey skeletal features. “We could not replicate [McKusick's] measurement studies, … so we weren't persuaded” at the time, says Robin Lyle, a turkey researcher with the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado. But now “it's all beginning to make sense.” [1]: pending:yes