Which came first?

[FluffyColor]

The chicken came first-just like how Adam began life as a man.

 

[Resolution]

The egg came first.

A junglefowl laid an egg and it hatched a defective chick. That chick would become the world's first domestic chicken.
This was happening with great frequency during the Neolithic Revolution as human beings ceased wandering about hunting and gathering -choosing to settle down and grow crops, rear livestock, build settlements. Practicing agriculture transformed the manner in which human beings lived and complete mapping of the chicken's genome helps us understand the origins of its domestication. We know about when, where and how it came into existence.


A Red Junglefowl produced a clutch of eggs. A defective chick was born that trailed behind the parents or failed to take heed when warned of the presence of a predator. The chick was very lucky that a human being took it into her care. The human being continued to collected defective junglefowl chicks that would have been eaten by monitor lizards, snakes, jungle crows, monkeys, herons, mongoose or a plethora of other common predators of South East Asia. These chicks would have lacked the aptitude to escape properly, may have had developmental issues, or were just not particularly bright- not the fittest of the hatch- Rather than being removed from the genetic pool as they would have had they been consumed by predators during natural selection, the nurtured chicks ended becoming genetic founders of new generations of eggs which tended to produce eggs carrying slightly higher % of chicks carrying the defective demes of their parents. For example, rather than jumping out of the shell and rushing from the nest, these chicks languished a while- took longer to dry and had less innate fear of nest disturbance. Perhaps they lacked some hard wiring to listen to their mother's alarm call when the nest was approached- or- perhaps the mother had no fear of the human being that nurtured her from day one. From these junglefowl eggs, produced by the junglefowl hen that would not have survived had it not been for human beings, those chicks that did not escape back into the bush never to be seen again by humans- those that allowed themselves to be picked up and carried about by humans would again, be selected by the humans- the defective junglefowl bred together were producing more defective junglefowl and human beings began intuitively selectively breeding for more of the same.- They were artificially selecting for tamer and tamer generations of junglefowl. With each new generation of junglefowl adapted ever more to living almost exclusively withing human settlements -domestication via genetic homogeneity was becoming refined. The human beings then took to carrying these tame junglefowl to places no junglefowl had ever lived before and the only surviving chicks would be those that had an innate trust of humans or at least not the instinct to run and hide at first sight of them. And so- eventually- every egg laid by populations of tame junglefowl- especially those living in regions where junglefowl are not native - began to hatch domestic chickens versus wild junglefowl.

 

[Zinnia-Hen]

The egg came first.

A junglefowl laid an egg and it hatched a defective chick. That chick would become the world's first domestic chicken.
This was happening with great frequency during the Neolithic Revolution as human beings ceased wandering about hunting and gathering -choosing to settle down and grow crops, rear livestock, build settlements. Practicing agriculture transformed the manner in which human beings lived and complete mapping of the chicken's genome helps us understand the origins of its domestication. We know about when, where and how it came into existence.


A Red Junglefowl produced a clutch of eggs. A defective chick was born that trailed behind the parents or failed to take heed when warned of the presence of a predator. The chick was very lucky that a human being took it into her care. The human being continued to collected defective junglefowl chicks that would have been eaten by monitor lizards, snakes, jungle crows, monkeys, herons, mongoose or a plethora of other common predators of South East Asia. These chicks would have lacked the aptitude to escape properly, may have had developmental issues, or were just not particularly bright- not the fittest of the hatch- Rather than being removed from the genetic pool as they would have had they been consumed by predators during natural selection, the nurtured chicks ended becoming genetic founders of new generations of eggs which tended to produce eggs carrying slightly higher % of chicks carrying the defective demes of their parents. For example, rather than jumping out of the shell and rushing from the nest, these chicks languished a while- took longer to dry and had less innate fear of nest disturbance. Perhaps they lacked some hard wiring to listen to their mother's alarm call when the nest was approached- or- perhaps the mother had no fear of the human being that nurtured her from day one. From these junglefowl eggs, produced by the junglefowl hen that would not have survived had it not been for human beings, those chicks that did not escape back into the bush never to be seen again by humans- those that allowed themselves to be picked up and carried about by humans would again, be selected by the humans- the defective junglefowl bred together were producing more defective junglefowl and human beings began intuitively selectively breeding for more of the same.- They were artificially selecting for tamer and tamer generations of junglefowl. With each new generation of junglefowl adapted ever more to living almost exclusively withing human settlements -domestication via genetic homogeneity was becoming refined. The human beings then took to carrying these tame junglefowl to places no junglefowl had ever lived before and the only surviving chicks would be those that had an innate trust of humans or at least not the instinct to run and hide at first sight of them. And so- eventually- every egg laid by populations of tame junglefowl- especially those living in regions where junglefowl are not native - began to hatch domestic chickens versus wild junglefowl.

That's what I would assume too, and was what I was going to say. :3