Samplings: September 2007

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Chicken skeleton superimposed on a Tongan tapa cloth with the shape of South America cut from it.

Tim Mackrell

When the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro arrived in what is now Peru in 1532, he found chickens already integrated into the local culture. But his observations of their presence sparked an academic controversy centuries later about how the chickens got there. Most historians think they arrived in the New World with Europeans around 1500, but new evidence suggests an altogether different origin. Alice Storey and Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith of the University of Auckland, along with their collaborators, radiocarbon-dated a chicken bone found among others several years ago at a Chilean archaeological site and analyzed its mitochondrial DNA. The site, El Arenal 1, lies on Chile’s western seaboard and predates Columbus. The bone, dated to the 120-year range between 1304 and 1424, suggests the ancient inhabitants of South America’s western coast were probably feasting on roast drumsticks well before the Spaniards arrived. So how did the chickens get to South America before Columbus? (They are clearly not native; domestic chickens are believed to be descended from wild birds of the Indian subcontinent.) Storey’s DNA analysis identified a genetic sequence in the El Arenal bone identical to one that occurs only in prehistoric chickens unearthed at archaeological sites in Tonga and American Samoa. The finding indicates that early Polynesian explorers likely sailed the Pacific with their favorite food on board. (PNAS)