Is what’s good for the goose… good for the farmer?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
We’ve been raising chickens for over four thousand years. But were they our first feathered friends?
Masaki Eda from the University of Hokkaido and team went on a wild goose chase. They unearthed goose bones from a seven-thousand-year-old village in eastern China.
They used a technique called radiocarbon dating to determine the bones’ age. By measuring physical breakdown researchers can tell how old carbon-containing materials are.
And, analyzing the bones’ shape, researchers found a very young goose! BUT no wild geese were raising young in the area. The bird that the bones came from would have been too young to fly.
So the researchers think these GEESE, not chickens, were the first domesticated birds. This is BEFORE the oldest conclusive evidence of chicken domestication.
Researchers believe the geese might have tamed themselves by coming TO the villagers’’ farms. Looks like the farmers weren’t counting their GEESE before they hatched!
Reference: Eda, M., Itahashi, Y., Kikuchi, H., Sun, G., Hsu, K.-H., Gakuhari, T., Yoneda, M., Jiang, L., Yang, G., & Nakamura, S. (2022). Multiple lines of evidence of early goose domestication in a 7,000-y-old rice cultivation village in the lower Yangtze River, China. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119(12), e2117064119.