Geese may have been the first birds to be domesticated 7000 years ago

By Michael Marshall

According to a study, geese may have been domesticated as early as 7000 years ago in China. The timing of chicken domestication is uncertain, but they may be the first bird to be domesticated.

Masaki Eda at Hokkaido University Museum in Hokkaido, Japan, says that the finding extends the history of goose domestication and possibly the history of domestic poultry as a whole.

Eda is part of a team that has excavated an archaeological site in east China that was once a Stone Age village. Eda says that the inhabitants were basically hunter-gatherers and grew rice in paddy fields.

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There are multiple lines of evidence that some of the geese were partially domesticated according to the researchers.

Four of the bones were from immature geese that were less than 16 weeks old. Eda says they must have hatched there because they were too young to have flown in from other places. He says that it is unlikely that wild geese bred in the area 7000 years ago.

Some of the adult geese seem to have been locally bred, based on the chemical make-up of their bones, which reflects the water they drank. The locally bred birds were all roughly the same size. The researchers carbon-dated the bones and found that the locally bred geese lived about 7000 years ago.

Eda says the findings suggest the geese were at an early stage of domestication.

Read more: Goats were first domesticated in western Iran 10,000 years ago

It is a major study in our understanding of poultry domestication.

The main thing that stood out for me was the fact that they did radiocarbon dating on the bird bones. The dating is more reliable if they dated the surrounding material.

Eda says that geese would be the first bird to be domesticated. There is a dispute over when and where this first happened.

Chickens were probably domesticated from wild birds. Genetics has complicated the story, revealing that domestic chickens interbred with other birds like the grey junglefowl.

Chickens were domesticated in northern China as early as 10,000 years ago, according to a study published in 2004. It isn't clear if red junglefowl ever lived that far north. The bones weren't dated and a lot of the things they claimed were chickens were pheasants. She says that the evidence of domestic chickens is from 5000 years ago.

Lebrasseur says she thinks it's true that geese were domesticated before chickens. She says the story could change as more evidence emerges because bird domestications are under studied compared to mammals.

Eda says it is difficult to say why the geese were domesticated. Chickens are often held in high esteem when they are first domesticated, and they may have been used in ritual ceremonies.

There is a journal reference in the PNAS.

There are more on these topics.