Chickens
Red junglefowl from Southeast Asia become the most numerous bird on Earth.
- When
- Known to
- ± 1.5 thousand years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
The chicken is domesticated from the red junglefowl, most likely in Southeast Asia in association with rice cultivation, with recent work favouring dates around 1500 BCE for the securely evidenced cases and earlier claims from China now widely doubted. Its later spread is total: there are now more chickens alive than all wild birds combined, and their bones are proposed as a marker layer for the Anthropocene.