It turns out that chickens didn’t come first, huh!
A new study of preserved goose bones revealed that these animals were domesticated as early as 7000 years ago in China. This means that they are the first bird to be taken care of. Hokkaido University Museum’s Masaki Eda and a team of experts excavated Tianluoshan, a Stone Age village between about 7000 and 5500 years old in east China. Out of the total of 232 bones at the location, four of them belonged to immature geese, which suggests that they hatched at the village. In addition, the adult geese bones were observed to have been locally bred and were all almost the same size. This implies captive breeding.
The evidence suggests that the geese were the first bird to be domesticated, while the chicken is a strong contender, there has been a dispute over when and where this happened (and no direct evidence to suggest the timeline for chicken domestication).
Image credit: Pedro da Silva