Long live long-limbed African chicken

Choose your chicken wisely. The choice could make or break your marriage.

For generations, farmers in the Horn of Africa have selectively selected chickens with certain characteristics that make them more attractive. Some choices are dictated by the traditional court rituals of the peasants; others are guided by more mundane concerns, such as taste and disease resistance.

The result is the development of a genetically distinct African chicken – a chicken with longer and fleshier thighs, according to a new study from the University of Washington at St. Louis published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. But this type of local breed, 3,000 years old, is threatened by the introduction of commercial cluckers.

This study contains the first metric baselines of chickens with a history known in the region, and it reveals a lot about the history of the process of selection and development of poultry in Africa, said Helina S. Woldekiros, badistant professor of anthropology of arts and sciences.

For this new work in collaboration with researchers from Exeter, Leicester, Nottingham, Oxford and Roehampton Universities in England, Woldekiros returned to a community in northern Ethiopia, near where she was working. discovered some of the oldest known material evidence of the introduction of chickens to the African continent.

"I am someone bone, so I'm especially interested in the magnitude of the change between archaeological hens and modern hens," Woldekiros said. She already had measurements of old chickens in her original discovery. So she approached 20 families in the small village of Mesert to ask if she could inspect their chickens before a Christmas celebration – and then treated all the bones after the chickens' consumption.

In addition to the very first domestic chickens from Africa and the current local African chicken breeds, the study includes the red junglefowl – a wild chicken that is found only in Asia – using from a collection held at the Natural History Museum in Tring, England, north-west London. .

By comparing the measurements of these three types of chickens, Woldekiros collaborated with his colleagues in the United Kingdom to identify the main differences to better understand the development of African poultry over the centuries.

"African farmers were choosing longer limbs," said Woldekiros. "They were looking for more fleshy thighs than fleshy wings." The length of the thighs has changed a lot. " The first domestic chickens, dating from 800 to 400 BC, also had a body size much closer to today's red junglefowl than modern domestic chicken.

African chickens are an essential source of protein for the farmers with whom Woldekiros works. Most Mesert families raise between five and seven birds at a time. The inhabitants attach particular importance to certain physical attributes, such as the colorful feathers of the stem and the patterns of elaborate combs. But Woldekiros is worried about a trend she has seen throughout her fieldwork.

"At present, exotic and commercial chickens are being introduced to Africa and local African breeds are in danger," said Woldekiros.

"They are more biologically diverse than exotic or commercial birds," she said. "We are now in danger of losing this diversity."

New chickens could be more productive, but it has a cost.

"The problem with new chickens, even though they produce more meat and more eggs, is that they are really expensive to keep," she said. "You have to build a shelter for them, so that they can not recover the local birds and they are very susceptible to diseases."

These costs weigh especially on widows and single mothers for whom chickens are traditionally a good source of income because they were so cheap to keep, she said.