[HN Gopher] The chicken first crossed the road in Southeast Asia...
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The chicken first crossed the road in Southeast Asia, landmark gene
study finds
Author : YeGoblynQueenne
Score : 125 points
Date : 2020-06-28 09:39 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencemag.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencemag.org)
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| I wonder how far the Chickenosaurus project is coming along.
| scorecard wrote:
| There is progress toward Jurassic Park. 1. Gene edits turn a
| bill into something like a dinosaur snout:
| https://www.livescience.com/50886-scientific-progress-dino-c...
| 2. early birds may have been baby dinosaurs that stopped
| developing, yet could produce off spring, according to another
| recent DNA study I can't locate at the moment. Now if that
| development process could be turned back on in a bird ...
| monadic2 wrote:
| I'm fairly sure this hypothesis predates Darwin.
| jshprentz wrote:
| Unanswered is the question of where and when a chicken would
| first have an opportunity to cross a road. The article reports
| that researchers traced chickens genetically back to southeast
| Asian pheasants domesticated around 7500 BCE. Beyond the title,
| the article mentions nothing about roads. At what point in
| history did some trails and paths become roads?
| jccooper wrote:
| Apparently there's evidence for domesticated chickens appear
| Mohenjo-Daro by c2000 BCE. That may be the first paved road
| that a chicken crossed. There would have been plenty of dirt
| paths all over the world well before the advent of the chicken,
| and I shouldn't be surprised at all to find a timber trackway
| in east Asia 4000 BCE or earlier. (There's one in Britain from
| that time.)
| masklinn wrote:
| There were stone-paved streets in Harappa and Ur, circa
| 4000BCE. There's also evidence of _log roads_ in England
| appearing between 4000 BCE and 3800BCE.
|
| Brick paving appeared in India around 3000BCE.
|
| By 2000 BCE, the "leading edge" roads had become quite
| advanced: Minos had tens of kilometers worth of roads which
| were not just paved but mortared, on thick subgrade, with side-
| drains and distinct shoulders, and anatolian roads had
| sidewalks.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| And the Romans perfected the art of building long and
| straight roads, some of which still are in use today.
| soperj wrote:
| Same with Inca roads.
| TomMarius wrote:
| Mostly just the same place, though. Even the terrain around
| it is probably very different.
| samatman wrote:
| Ah yes, the Road of Theseus problem.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| Is it the same road if it is renumbered ?
| kinghtown wrote:
| I guess this is why Korean and Taiwanese fried chicken is the
| best.
| quicklime wrote:
| I don't follow, Korea and Taiwan are not part of South-East
| Asia?
| kinghtown wrote:
| I really need to read links before posting any comments. My
| bad. (Taiwan's fried chicken is still really amazing.)
| ksaj wrote:
| Yes people should read the links before commenting, lest
| they end up sounding like capricious idiots. But this was
| in the title.
| lazylizard wrote:
| And its gonna be hard to find ayam penyet in taiwan or
| korea...
| pvaldes wrote:
| There are four species of Gallus. Only one, the red jungle fowl
| hens, became the mother of modern chicken, in several places at
| the same time, but the history is more complicated than that.
|
| Indonesian for example have an endemic species, the green one,
| and are fond of producing red+green hybrids for navigation at
| open sea [1]. Green is the oldest species and does not live in
| China.
|
| Then we have the chicken skin. Plucked chicken are typically
| yellow. Only a few chicken breeds have black skin, they are all
| black in fact, black beak, legs, caruncles, crest, inner organs
| and even black bones
|
| But when we think in a plucked modern chicken is yellow. This is
| because the grey species, from India, provided the yellow gene.
| Therefore all (or almost) chicken that you can buy in the market
| have indian blood. Grey (and Ceylon's wildfowl) are endemic from
| Indian continent. And any study that is not sampling this areas
| would be incomplete.
|
| The red was adapted to rainforest but is a species from bamboo
| cloud forests also in the mountains, so provided the cold
| resistance gene, and won in the battle being the easiest to
| breed.
|
| [1] Each rooster has a different song that is really loud and
| unique from this animal. People go fishing with their pet rooster
| and thus can locate the position of all other people easily even
| in dense fog or open sea.
| coderintherye wrote:
| Wow, rooster identification as sort of a "Marco-Polo" is rather
| ingenious.
| fortran77 wrote:
| The question isn't when. It's _why_.
| sysrpl wrote:
| Why did the chicken cross the road?
|
| The next time someone asks you this question, you can give them
| the following answer.
|
| The question "Why did the chicken cross the road" is invalid. It
| is invalid because "why" assumes that the chicken had some reason
| for taking the action "cross the road". This, in turn, assumes
| that the chicken has the concept of "road"; after all, if the
| chicken doesn't know that the road is there, then the chicken did
| not - from the chickens point of view - cross the road, and
| consequently it is meaningless to ask for its motivations for
| doing so.
|
| Since chicken is an animal, it is unlikely that it has the
| concept of road in the same sense than humans do; since it is a
| bird, whose ancestors were propably capable of flight in the near
| past, it is unlikely to have the concept of road in any sense -
| why would a flying bird need roads?
|
| Therefore, the chicken can never have any motivation for crossing
| the road, since from the chickens point of view, it never does
| any such thing. It simply moves from one point to another, and
| these points happen to be on the opposite side of a flat area of
| ground. No road-crossing has happened.
|
| Think of it this way: if you walk over a scent trail left by some
| animal, and you don't know that the trail is there, it is foolish
| to ask your motives of crossing that trail. One can ask your
| motives for walking in the first place, but the crossing was pure
| coincidence and not something you chose.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Do I have to have the same understanding of a road as you do to
| intentionally cross it? Maybe my understanding is only "the
| thing that makes me feet hot when I walk on it." I can still
| make a conscious decision whether I want to get my feet hot in
| order to accomplish something on the other side.
| baddox wrote:
| > "why" assumes that the chicken had some reason for taking the
| action "cross the road".
|
| I don't think so. It's pretty normal to ask "why" questions
| about non-conscious entities. "Why does my stomach hurt?" "Why
| is the sky blue?" And so on.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Does a chicken have consciousness? If so, when talking about
| conscious beings, are we using why in the sense that we use
| it when asking why the sky is blue?
| baddox wrote:
| I don't think it even necessarily matters whether the
| chicken is sufficiently conscious. If we asked "why does
| the chicken have a red comb?" it would be clear we weren't
| asking for an explanation of the chicken's conscious
| choices.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Sure, but I think if I ask "Why did you do that?" I'm
| specifically asking for an explanation related to your
| consciousness rather than a physical explanation. That's
| a different sort of question than "Why are you six feet
| tall?"
|
| I asked if chickens are conscious because, if the chicken
| _is_ conscious (or at least if the question asker
| believes they are) than we're asking the first sort of
| question and it may or may not be fair to call that
| question invalid based on a chicken's conscious
| understanding and sysrpl's reasoning.
|
| If it's not, then we can only reasonably ask the second
| kind of question and I agree it wouldn't be "invalid" to
| do so.
| kumarharsh wrote:
| I think it'd be easier to reply "I don't know" than killing the
| party with this answer.
| jameshart wrote:
| Tl;dr: to get to the other side
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| The blood sport connection makes me wonder "when the chicken
| crossed the road[1], what was his entrance music?"
|
| "He's constantly confusing, confounding, won't throw the
| towel / Everyone give it up for America's favourite fighting
| fowl"
|
| [1] a "road" might also be a sea route, but it looks like
| land-based roads predate seaborne trade by several thousand
| years.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Every winter, looking at our chickens roosting in their unheated
| coop at -15C, I marvel at the ability of the descendant of a bird
| from the tropics to survive in a Canadian winter.
|
| But then I remember that my species comes from eastern Africa...
| markdown wrote:
| I imagine that chickens had to adapt to the cold much much much
| faster than humans had to.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yes, and I get the advantage of clothes :-)
|
| They don't even seem that bothered by it. If you put a heater
| in the coop they don't make a point of perching near it, for
| example. They hate the snow like it's lava though.
| koheripbal wrote:
| That depends which humans. We are not one monolithic gene
| pool. Human diversity means that more recent migrations of
| humans had less time to adjust to their new climates.
|
| If you compare, say Inuit, Nordic, and native Siberian
| populations, to subsequent equatorial populations to higher
| latitudes, if you could find instances of low interbreeding,
| I wonder if we'd see certain genetic adaptations missing.
| churchillracist wrote:
| > imagine that chickens had to adapt to the cold
|
| They already had that adaptation. Chickens are members of the
| fowl family which are all homeothermic animals, meaning that
| they maintain their own body temperature. Chickens
| thermoregulate their body temperatures through their
| respiratory system. Heat is lost by the bird as sensible heat
| directly to the atmosphere when the temperature gradient is
| sufficiently great and as insensible heat by the evaporation
| of water from the respiratory system and skin when the
| temperature gradient is less but relative humidity is low.
| The layer of fat usually found under the skin plus the coat
| of feathers provide very good protection from low temperature
| and it is unlikely that birds other than young chickens will
| die of hypothermia. For a constant deep body temperature to
| be maintained, heat production must equal heat loss.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| I live in the UK and I am amazed that date palms do well
| here, in a country with much higher rainfall and it does get
| colder than the middle east. Also agaves seem quite happy
| (what tequila is made out of.
|
| What's actually more surprising than cold tolerance is that
| water tolerance; desert-y plants tend to be adapted to be
| needing periods where their roots are dry for long periods.
| Let them stand with wet feet and many desert plants get very
| upset.
|
| I guess the middle east was wetter even in roman times, so
| perhaps that answers part of that.
|
| To flip the chicken question around a bit, it's perhaps odd
| that chickens can cope not with the cold but with their
| native heat so well, what with wearing a full-body, heavy
| down jacket all the time in their native tropical jungle.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Bird feathers can trap air inside and can be raised all
| together in a second making it work like a sponge. A better
| analogy could be wearing a flask
| smichel17 wrote:
| My understanding is that they lose a lot of water through
| their skin. Not a deep enough understanding to know whether
| saying "chickens sweat a lot" is accurate, but I imagine in
| either case the evaporation helps them keep cool.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Chickens molt! They rid themselves of the feathers and down
| periodically.
| throwaway_pdp09 wrote:
| And then they grow them back again I presume. In the
| middle of a jungle forest. It seems odd.
| sradman wrote:
| > But then I remember that my species comes from eastern
| Africa...
|
| via Madagascar via South East Asia, assuming I'm remembering
| Jared Diamond correctly. I wonder if there are any Polynesian
| strains with interesting genetic diversity.
| sradman wrote:
| I was being fuzzy with my language. Between 5kya and 3kya
| [1], the domesticated chickens that began their journey in
| mainland Asia ended up as part of the standard toolkit of the
| Melanesian and Polynesian people that spread widely
| throughout the Pacific. If any of those chicken strains
| remain, they might be genetically unique compared to what we
| find in mainland Asia today.
|
| I'm interested in the origins of domestication not returning
| to some form of pastoral idealism. I need to strike
| "diversity" from my vocabulary. I should have said
| "interesting genetic variations".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#Origins_and_expan
| sio...
| samstave wrote:
| Sadly, haven't Humans worked diligently to eliminate genetic
| diversity in chickens - look at the history of how the Rocky
| Chicken, the most widely eaten chicken was bred.
| ghaff wrote:
| Go to a fair in farm country and you'll see plenty of
| variety. But, yes, as with other animals raised for food
| and dairy (and plants for that matter), mainstream
| commercial production is mostly a near-monoculture.
| samatman wrote:
| Which is a trend that must stop.
|
| After we've all seen what SARS2 can do to the industrial
| world, the risk monoculture poses for breeding a bird flu
| which can jump to poultry handlers is simply
| unacceptable.
|
| Monoculture, and the conditions of chicken husbandry,
| simply must improve. This is an existential risk.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| There's lots of variety out there still, just not in
| factory farms.
|
| Lucky for the chicken it has a personality which humans
| seem to get immense enjoyment out of.
|
| My wife has gone a little chicken crazy since I brought
| home 4 pullets a couple years ago...
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I am confused. I thought it was long established that the chicken
| came from SE Asia. Why is this article a "landmark study"?
| ksaj wrote:
| I just mentioned this article to my Vietnamese partner, and got
| a lengthy story about how the modern chicken came from SE Asian
| pheasants, which are often referred to as "jungle chickens," as
| taught 30+ years ago in primary school.
|
| So it's pretty clear that there are generations of children who
| were well aware of the connection, too. There must be something
| hidden in the details that would raise this study to the lofty
| level of "landmark."
| partyboat1586 wrote:
| Thought this was an Onion headline at first.
| econcon wrote:
| Doesn't it make sense that flying dragons fossils are often found
| in South East Asia so chickens appeared there?
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