The chickens...were just black in the first plumage, but late in autumn to my astonishment red feather after red feather very strangely appeared in the Cocks and now one of the Cocks is nearly as splendid as the wild Gallus Bankiva.This 1860 observation would result in a debate lasting nearly one hundred and fifty years --what is the origin of the chicken? Darwin maintained that the Red Jungle Fowl (Gallus Gallus) of Southern Asia was the mother of all chickens based on the red feather reversion in his simple breeding experiments. However, body size data, archeological findings and even linguistic evidence made a case for multiple lineages. Is the ancestor for Darwin‘s chicken different than the one I had for dinner? How many times has domestication occurred over the past 8000 years?
Two studies in the mid 1990’s utilizing mitochondrial DNA technology supported the idea that one subspecies of the red jungle fowl (Gallus gallus gallus) was the mother of the domestic chicken--seeming to put an end to the long lasting argument. These initial experiments, however, were critiqued for using an insufficient data set. A 2006 report once again resolves the dispute after improving the experiment by using a greater sample size. They concluded, “Chickens have multiple maternal origins and that domestications occurred in at least three regions of South and Southeast Asia”.
So... there's more than one mother clucker.
Fumihito et al. 1994
Fumihito et al. 1996
Liu et al. 2006
