Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[SimpleJenn]

I like asking the boys to crow, they usually do!

 

[Shadrach]

Found some interesting images on Chinese painted wallpaper: chicken or jungle fowl? what do you think, and why?
View attachment 4125699
View attachment 4125703
(sorry about the poor quality; they were protected by Perspex and the reflection was unavoidable)

Are these portraits or impressions?

Three and a half sunny hours at the field today.

 

[Molpet]

Here are a few links, Molpet, to help..

https://www.the-scientist.com/domesticated-chickens-were-initially-friends-not-food-70105

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-wild-jungle-fowl-became-chicken

and because I love a good peer reviewed journal article;

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81589-7

So yeah not China and India. And not 6k years ago.

I was probably remembering this old study listed in one of the links:

However, West and Zhou7 proposed an earlier origin in Southeast Asia, before the 6000 BC, based on archaeological evidence from China, Southeast Asia, and Europe, and palaeoclimatic evidence in China.

 

[thistlewick]

Yeah the abstract of that article states:

"These results suggest that the ancestral populations of Thai indigenous chickens were large, and that a part of the red junglefowl population gene pool was not involved in the domestication process. In addition, some haplogroups that are distributed in other countries of Southeast Asia were not observed in either the red junglefowls or the indigenous chickens examined in the present study, suggesting that chicken domestication occurred independently across multiple regions in Southeast Asia."

My favorite part of all of this is how we just really aren't sure, because we really don't fundamentally understand these dinosaurs' ancient DNA very well.

 

[Perris]

I'm curious, do you still have 3G over there? My Dad used a Palm Treo 650 (I believe) up until 2020 when they shut off the 3G.

it depends on where you are and who your provider is because it's being withdrawn gradually
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and...itch-off-our-expectations-of-mobile-providers

 

[Perris]

Are these portraits or impressions?

artist's impressions, but the variety in the room led me to think the artist was trying to reproduce real birds, not inventing them out of their heads, especially with something like this, which looks to me like a male / female pair of another species (don't know what) with white legs

while these, for example, have different shapes and postures from the putative chicken

 

[BDutch]

It seems like the photos of the red jungle hen look very like the figure in the wallpaper, but I’ve searched several sites for G. G. spaedicus, and none have combs or wattles. But those fan tails (don’t know what you’d call them X) look so similar!View attachment 4125949
https://birdsoftheworld.org/bow/species/redjun/cur/introduction

View attachment 4125953

The colouring of Ini mini is very much like the red jungle hen.

 

[Perris]

Nice clear and concise statement of the current thinking, based on "archaeological occurrences and the domestic status of chickens from ∼600 sites in 89 countries [were assessed] by combining zoogeographic, morphological, osteometric, stratigraphic, contextual, iconographic, and textual data" :

"Our results suggest that the first unambiguous domestic chicken bones are found at Neolithic Ban Non Wat in central Thailand dated to ∼1650 to 1250 BCE, and that chickens were not domesticated in the Indian Subcontinent. Chickens did not arrive in Central China, South Asia, or Mesopotamia until the late second millennium BCE, and in Ethiopia and Mediterranean Europe by ∼800 BCE." Peters et. al. The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens PNAS 2022 open access https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2121978119 (which is the paper summarised in the Science Org article that @thistlewick linked to above).

I also note from the same paper that "Within the native range of red junglefowl, many Southeast Asian languages refer to chickens as “bamboo fowl,” given how readily they take advantage of cyclical bamboo mass flowering and seeding events", and the Chatsworth birds are depicted by what is clearly bamboo stems.

 

[ChaosMom]

your lupins and peonies are at least 2-3 weeks ahead of mine; I guess that is the result of the cold wet Feb and March here, given we're on essentially the same latitude...

I just thought of this post. I have buds on the lupines ready to open, and the remaining peonies (remaining from front yard re-do) opened in the last two days:

 

[ChaosMom]

Oh, Trudy…