What follows is conjecture.
Austronesian Seafarers carried
Gallus giganteus from the
Comoros Islands and/or
Madagascar to their homelands in
South East Asia and Indonesia.
Fossil records
reveal that, long ago, junglefowl very similar to the species we know today scratched and pecked a
wide swath of Eurasia, the Middle East and East Africa .
Like many
landbirds of remote islands unoccupied by human predators,
Gallus giganteus was gigantic and semi-flightless. It had no innate fear of humans. It was also very
closely related to other Junglefowl native today only in Southern, South East Asia and Indonesia.
There may have been more than one form native to any number of isolated islands in the Indian Ocean. These islands would hypothetically, be remnants of larger land bodies washed beneath the sea during the
Interglacial Period. This is a cyclical period in time when the earth's huge glacial sheets melt rapidly, rising the level of the oceans. This large junglefowl became marooned on a few islands where it became flightless and fearless. One form may have been prominently crested with no wattles. Its gular lappet may have been as prominent as that of the Green Junglefowl. Its comb was a big knob. The facial area was partially feathered, specialized downy plumuelles covering the suborbital and subaurical regions. Another form or just possibly a different sex - exhibited completely bare face with prominent cap of feathers on its head but no crest -no feathering on the face. It may be that both forms were naked necked or at least seasonally when the sexes moulted their neck plumes, revealing vividly coloured skin.
This group of flightless fowl were carried everywhere the Austronesians went. They were crossbred with the South East Asian Red Junglefowl native to the Austronesian's homeland. This probably occurred very early on in the development of the domesticated species we all know so much about.
Concurrently, a different peoples indigenous to Indonesia ( the Austronesians were newcomers) known as the
Melanesians were flourishing in their own ancient culture. They had independently domesticated their own native fowl the Indonesian Red Junglefowl, a close cousin of the continental South East Asian species. They had also experimented with hybridization with the
Austronesian's fowl to create the
world's first fighting games .
Another experimental byproduct of cultural infusion that also occurred very early on in the domestication of the junglefowl was the paternal hybridization
of Green Junglefowl males on the domesticated Red Junglefowl and Austronesian fowl females. This created another race of fowl, the
"Early Migration Seafarers" These birds held additional ceremonial and religious esteem than the
Malay's Game Fowl.
These two subraces were carried everywhere either of the respective seafarer cultures and new cultures formed by the admixtured populations between them (=Polynesian) took these invaluable commodities.
Seafaring cultures tend to bring their livestock to new homes -new frontiers. Sometimes on islands with favorable ecology those population of introduced livestock became naturalized as purely feral species.
Because the founder pools were so small, unusual mutations ( i.e. hyper-melanizm; dwarfism; zygotactyla; all the above) would often become dominant features in the genetic landscape. These unique populations represent unique evolutionary novelties. They are not true species and can interbreed freely with their close relatives remaining back on whatever continent the parental species originated. But due to their isolation and closed gene pools they often appear so.
