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Sir Hamster of Elderberry
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 Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 4:34 pm Post subject: Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road^H^H^H^H Pacific Ocean |
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We seem to be on a real Chicken thing lately ...
| nature.com wrote: | News
Nature 447, 620-621 (7 June 2007) | doi:10.1038/447620b; Published online 6 June 2007
DNA reveals how the chicken crossed the sea
Brendan Borrell
Abstract
Ancient Polynesians may have brought birds to the Americas.
The discovery of chicken bones with Polynesian DNA at an archaeological site in Chile has added hard, physical evidence to the controversial theory that ancient seafarers from the south Pacific visited the New World long before Columbus.
When the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro first visited Peru in 1532, he noted the importance of chickens in the daily lives and religious rituals of the Incas. But how the birds got there was a mystery. Chickens were first domesticated in Asia, and their absence from archaeological sites in the Americas indicates that they were not carried by migrating peoples over a land bridge from Asia to Alaska.
One alternative theory — that Polynesians visited the Americas, bringing livestock with them and perhaps influencing cultural and technological development in the region — has long been disparaged by mainstream archaeologists, as it has largely been supported by supposition rather than evidence.
So Alice Storey of the University of Auckland, New Zealand, was not particularly enthusiastic when a colleague in Chile asked her to sequence DNA from a trove of ancient chicken bones he had excavated at El Arenal, a site occupied between 700 and 1390 AD, to see if their origins could be traced to the Pacific islands. "I thought, 'Well, we'll give it a go'," she says.
DNA reveals how the chicken crossed the sea
Storey and her team reconstructed a 400-base-pair fragment of mitochondrial DNA from both the Chilean bones and chicken bones excavated on five archipelagos in Polynesia. Mitochondrial DNA doesn't mutate much and so is useful for tracing evolutionary lines. The Chilean sequences were identical to those from prehistoric sites in Tonga and Samoa (A. A. Storey et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA doi:10.1073/pnas.0703993104; 2007). Radiocarbon analysis dated the bones to between 1304 and 1424 AD, firmly before Europeans arrived on the east coast of South America in the 1500s. The same sequences are also present in the modern-day Araucana chicken, an odd Chilean breed that has tufted 'ears', lays blue eggs and lacks a tail.
The study has left the research community cautiously optimistic that hard evidence for migration of Polynesians has been found. Jaime Gongora, a molecular geneticist at the University of Sydney, Australia, says the paper is a significant contribution to the field, but warns that the small fragments obtained from ancient DNA may tell only part of the story. The final verdict will require more extensive DNA data to make a full family tree of both modern and ancient breeds, he says.
Archaeologist Terry Jones at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, who has studied prehistoric Polynesian contact in the New World, is less circumspect. "It's essentially unequivocal evidence," he says.
Evidence of contact between the communities has been put forward in the past. In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl famously filmed his journey by raft from Peru across the Pacific to try to prove that South Americans could have settled the Pacific islands; although the theory was at odds with much of the evidence.
More recently, Jones, along with Kathryn Klar at the University of California, Berkeley, has argued that the Polynesians introduced complex fish hooks and sewn plank canoes to the Chumash and Gabrielino Indians in southern California and the Mapuche Indians in Chile (K. A. Klar and T. L. Jones Am. Antiquity 70, 457–484; 2005). Others argue that Polynesians must have visited the tropical coast of South America in order to bring back the sweet potato and the bottle gourd. The voyage to South America is no more daunting than other trips Polynesians are known to have made.
Even so, one of the co-authors on the chicken study, Atholl Anderson at the Australian National University, Canberra, is wary of overestimating the extent of this cultural diffusion without further study. Although the chickens provide hard evidence of transoceanic contact, the evidence that large-scale cultural exchange occurred remains largely circumstantial, he says. |
ni! <cluck> i!u |
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mohrorless
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| Posted: Wed Jun 06, 2007 5:23 pm Post subject: |
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Q. Why did the chicken cross the Ocean?
A. To "F" with modern science! 
Maybe the chicken migrated with......a coconut!
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Sir Hamster of Elderberry
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 8:31 am Post subject: |
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| mohrorless wrote: | Q. Why did the chicken cross the Ocean?
A. To "F" with modern science!
Maybe the chicken migrated with......a coconut! |
Are you suggesting that coconuts are migratory??? 
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mohrorless
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 9:55 am Post subject: |
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| Sir Hamster of Elderberry wrote: | | mohrorless wrote: | Q. Why did the chicken cross the Ocean?
A. To "F" with modern science!
Maybe the chicken migrated with......a coconut! |
Are you suggesting that coconuts are migratory???
ni! i!u |
No, but it appears that chickens are & maybe they could grab the coconut by the husk & bring it along.
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KWSN Im Not Dead
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 11:13 am Post subject: |
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Migrating Chickens...this is not a bad idea. You go to bed, no chickens. You wake up at 5:30 am to the sound of 50+ migrating Chickens that decided to stop in your front lawn. Not all is bad though, as they leave you get fresh eggs and if you are fast you get Chicken dinner too! yumm yumm 
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Sir Hamster of Elderberry
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 11:26 am Post subject: |
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... and if you are really lucky ... FRESH COCONUTS too!  |
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Clark
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 1:56 pm Post subject: |
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Would that be an Asian or Alaskan Coconut?
The Alaskan is a lot heavier and couldn't be carried under the dorsal palm frond
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mohrorless
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 3:27 pm Post subject: |
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but if it was dragged.....
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Sir Hamster of Elderberry
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 4:56 pm Post subject: |
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A couple of problems here:
1) Palm are a tropical/neo-tropical species, and highly unlikely to thrive in the Alaskan climate.
and
2) in addition to the difficulty involved with a chicken dragging a coconut-weighted palm leaf for any considerable distance, this also seems to imply the existence of either A) a land route between Asia and South America, or B) chickens have access to underwater conveyances (perhaps?) far beyond our expectations.
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mohrorless
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| Posted: Thu Jun 07, 2007 6:07 pm Post subject: |
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No one expected the rabbit to have fangs either!!!!
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KWSN Im Not Dead
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| Posted: Fri Jun 08, 2007 8:00 am Post subject: |
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| Sir Hamster of Elderberry wrote: | | 2) in addition to the difficulty involved with a chicken dragging a coconut-weighted palm leaf for any considerable distance, this also seems to imply the existence of either A) a land route between Asia and South America, or B) chickens have access to underwater conveyances |
You HAVE heard of "Chicken of the Sea" tuna? Maybe there is more to this than we know?
And when you run a Jet Ski the water that shoots into the air is known as a "Rooster Tail"... very suspicious.
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Al Dente
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| Posted: Sat Jun 09, 2007 10:51 pm Post subject: |
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So, if I've understood this correctly, Chickens crossed the Pacific on Jet-Skis, dragging their coconuts behind them?
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mohrorless
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| Posted: Sun Jun 10, 2007 5:04 am Post subject: |
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Maybe they pushed the coconut
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