Study: The Chicken Didn't Cross The Pacific To South America

hide captionA Filipino chicken vendor in Quezon City, east of Manila, Philippines. Researchers say Pacific island chicken are genetically similar to the variety found in the Philippines, but different from South American chicken.

A Filipino chicken vendor in Quezon City, east of Manila, Philippines. Researchers say Pacific island chicken are genetically similar to the variety found in the Philippines, but different from South American chicken.

An analysis of DNA from chicken bones collected in the South Pacific appears to dispel a long-held theory that the ubiquitous bird first arrived in South America aboard an ancient Polynesian seafarer's ocean-going outrigger.

Instead, researchers who sequenced mitochondrial DNA from modern and ancient chicken specimens collected from Polynesia and the islands of Southeast Asian found those populations are genetically distinct from chickens found in South America.

"[The] lack of the Polynesian sequences [of DNA] in modern South American chickens ... would argue against any trading contact as far as chickens go," says Alan Cooper, director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, who is a co-author in the study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

(For a treatise on the origins of the domesticated chicken, and how the bird came to play such a key role in the human diet, see this.)

The finding may shed light on one of the most vexing questions in modern anthropology: Did South Pacific seafarers, who evidence shows settled island chains separated by vast stretches of ocean, reach the coast of South America before the time of Christopher Columbus?

The evidence is contradictory.

In a similar study published in 2007, researchers looked at chicken bones found at an archeological site in Chile that were radiocarbon dated to pre-Columbian times (between 1321 and 1407). DNA analysis of those specimens found what scientists thought was a genetic mutation unique to Polynesian chickens which would point to a Pacific origin for the birds only to discover later that the mutation is common in all chickens.

Alice Storey, an archeologist who led the 2007 study, is skeptical of the latest results. She says the new study focuses too much on modern DNA.

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Study: The Chicken Didn't Cross The Pacific To South America