Chicken: History and Origins

The chicken is the most numerous bird on Earth and the most-eaten meat in the world, and almost everything most reference books say about how it got here has recently been revised. A 2022 reassessment that combined direct radiocarbon dating of the bones themselves with a re-examination of what the bones actually were pushed the domestication of the chicken thousands of years later than the textbooks had it — to roughly 1500 BCE in central Thailand — and tied it not to a deliberate act of animal husbandry but to a farming change: dry rice cultivation, which spread grain across open ground and drew the wild red junglefowl out of the forest and into human settlements. Even after the bird reached the Mediterranean and Europe, it spent centuries as a fighting animal, an oracle and an exotic curiosity before it became dinner. The transformation into the food we know now happened almost entirely within living memory.

Table of Contents

  1. The Wild Ancestor: Red Junglefowl
  2. A Second Parent: The Grey Junglefowl and Yellow Skin
  3. The Dates Moved: A Much Later Domestication
  4. Why Rice Farming Made the Chicken
  5. What the Genome Records About Domestication
  6. Westward: The Long Journey to the Mediterranean
  7. Fighting Bird, Oracle, Curiosity — Not Dinner
  8. Rome: Sacred Chickens and the First Real Poultry Farming
  9. Medieval and Early-Modern Husbandry
  10. Across the Atlantic and the Pacific
  11. Hen Fever and the Invention of Breeds
  12. 1948: The Chicken of Tomorrow
  13. The Numbers Behind the Transformation
  14. What Fast Growth Costs the Bird
  15. Antibiotics: Growth Promotion and Its Retreat
  16. The Chicken Today
  17. Legends, Claims and What the Evidence Says
  18. Research Papers and References
  19. Connections
  20. Featured Videos

The Wild Ancestor: Red Junglefowl

Every chicken in the world descends primarily from the red junglefowl, Gallus gallus, a pheasant-family bird of the forests and forest edges of South and Southeast Asia. If you have only ever seen a supermarket broiler, a red junglefowl is a surprise: a slim, wary, fast-flying bird about the size of a small hen, the cock brilliantly coloured with a coppery mane and long arching tail, the hen a drab brown that vanishes in leaf litter. It roosts in trees. It lays a small clutch of six or so eggs once or twice a year, tied to the seasons, and it does not stay put.

Several subspecies of red junglefowl are recognised across the bird's range, and genetic work has narrowed the ancestry of domestic chickens toward the population of mainland Southeast Asia rather than the Indian subcontinent. The most detailed synthesis of archaeology, genetics and history published so far points at Gallus gallus spadiceus, the subspecies of the region spanning present-day Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and southern China, as the principal wild source of the domestic bird.

Two things about that wild bird matter for everything that follows. First, its reproduction is strictly seasonal — it lays when day length and food supply say so, and not otherwise. Second, it is a ground-feeding opportunist that will follow a food source into the open. Domestication turned the first trait off and exploited the second.

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A Second Parent: The Grey Junglefowl and Yellow Skin

The chicken is not descended from a single wild species. The clearest single piece of evidence for that is sitting in your supermarket: the yellow skin of a great many commercial chickens.

Yellow skin is caused by a variant of a gene called BCDO2, which controls whether carotenoid pigments from the diet are broken down in the skin or allowed to accumulate there. When researchers traced the yellow-skin allele back through wild Gallus species in 2008, it did not come from the red junglefowl at all. It matched the grey junglefowl, Gallus sonneratii, of peninsular India. A domestic chicken therefore carries at least one clearly identifiable stretch of DNA from a second wild species — evidence of hybridisation somewhere in the bird's history, most plausibly on the Indian subcontinent as domestic chickens moved west and met grey junglefowl in the wild.

That single gene is a good reminder of how domestication actually works. It is rarely one event in one valley. It is a long, messy process of movement, local crossing with whatever wild relatives are to hand, and selection by many people for many different reasons.

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The Dates Moved: A Much Later Domestication

This is the part most reference material still gets wrong. For decades, popular and academic sources placed chicken domestication somewhere between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago, usually citing bones from Neolithic northern China or from Indus Valley sites. Those claims have not survived scrutiny.

The problem was twofold. Chicken bones are small, thin and easily moved downward through a site by burrowing animals, ploughing and pit digging, so a bone can end up in a layer far older than itself. And several bird species in the same regions — pheasants in particular — leave bones that are genuinely hard to tell from a chicken's without careful comparison.

In 2022 two linked studies attacked both problems directly. One re-examined the identification and context of purported early chicken remains across Eurasia and north-west Africa and radiocarbon-dated the bones themselves rather than the layers they were found in. A large proportion turned out to be far younger than their supposed contexts — intrusive bones that had worked their way down into older deposits. The claimed Neolithic Chinese and third-millennium-BCE Indus chickens did not hold up.

The companion study assembled the surviving securely dated evidence and reached a strikingly late conclusion: the earliest reliable domestic chicken remains come from Ban Non Wat and related sites in central Thailand, dating to roughly 1650–1250 BCE — that is, around 1500 BCE, in the Bronze Age, not the Neolithic. The chicken is therefore one of the most recently domesticated of our common farm animals, thousands of years younger than cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, and younger than the domestic dog by an enormous margin.

If you read elsewhere that chickens were domesticated 8,000 or 10,000 years ago, that figure comes from the pre-2022 literature. It is worth saying plainly because the error is still repeated almost everywhere.

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Why Rice Farming Made the Chicken

The new dating did more than move a number. It supplied a mechanism, and the mechanism is more interesting than the date.

The earliest secure chicken bones appear alongside the spread of dry-field (rainfed) rice and millet cultivation into mainland Southeast Asia. Growing cereals on open, cleared ground does something specific to a forest-edge, ground-feeding bird: it puts a dense, predictable, year-round pile of grain exactly where the bird can reach it, in daylight, in the open, next to people.

Junglefowl came to the fields. They stayed near the settlements. Over generations of feeding, tolerating and eventually confining them, the relationship tipped from commensal — a wild animal exploiting a human-made habitat — into domestication. This is the same pattern proposed for several other domesticates: the animal moves in first, and husbandry follows.

It also explains the timing. The chicken could not be domesticated before there was a reason for junglefowl to leave the forest, and that reason was agriculture in the right form, in the right place.

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What the Genome Records About Domestication

Whole-genome comparisons of domestic chickens against wild red junglefowl have identified regions swept clean of variation by strong selection. Two stand out.

The first is the thyroid-stimulating hormone receptor gene, TSHR. A variant at this locus is essentially fixed across domestic chickens worldwide and is essentially absent from wild birds. TSHR sits in the pathway that ties reproduction to day length. The most widely accepted interpretation is that this variant relaxed the strict seasonal control on breeding — the single change that turns a bird laying a few eggs a year into a bird that will lay more or less continuously given enough food and light. Everything about the chicken as a farm animal follows from that.

The second is a region around the insulin-like growth factor 1 gene, which shows strong selection in commercial broiler lines specifically. That one is recent — a signature not of ancient domestication but of the twentieth-century breeding programmes described below.

Genome-wide surveys of village and commercial chickens worldwide also show what you would expect from the archaeology: high diversity across Southeast and South Asia, and progressively narrower diversity in populations further away and in modern commercial lines.

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Westward: The Long Journey to the Mediterranean

From Southeast Asia the chicken travelled in every direction, and the direction that matters for European and American food history is west — through China and India, across Persia, into Mesopotamia and Egypt, and along the Mediterranean by ship.

Here too the direct-dating work rewrote the map. Under the older chronology, chickens were in Egypt and the Levant well before 1500 BCE and in Europe not long after. On the redated evidence, chickens reach the eastern Mediterranean in the earlier first millennium BCE and spread across the Mediterranean and into western and northern Europe from roughly 800 BCE onward, carried by Phoenician, Greek and later Roman maritime trade. Britain and Scandinavia are later still.

The Egyptian record contains a famous, telling gap. Chickens appear in Egyptian texts and art as rarities and royal gifts — the annals of Thutmose III describe a marvellous foreign bird that "gives birth daily", which is usually read as a chicken, and a bird is drawn on an ostracon from the Valley of the Kings — and then, for centuries, almost nothing. A bird that lays an egg a day is an astonishment worth recording in a royal inscription; that is not how anybody writes about a staple food. The chicken was a curiosity in Egypt long before it was a crop.

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Fighting Bird, Oracle, Curiosity — Not Dinner

The single most counter-intuitive fact in the chicken's history is that for its first thousand years or more in the West, it was not primarily food.

The archaeological signature is unmistakable. Early chicken bones in Europe are frequently whole — complete skeletons, buried carefully, sometimes with people, sometimes alone in what look like deliberate deposits. They do not carry the butchery marks, the breakage for marrow, the burning and the selective body-part representation that food refuse carries. Cocks are over-represented relative to hens in a way that no meat economy would produce.

What people did with them instead:

  1. Cockfighting. The red junglefowl cock is naturally combative and equipped for it. Fighting was very likely among the earliest reasons to keep and move the bird, and it followed the chicken across Asia and into the Mediterranean world well ahead of any interest in the carcass.
  2. Divination and augury. The rooster's crowing at dawn made it an obvious solar and prophetic animal across the ancient world, and its feeding behaviour was read for omens.
  3. Ritual and status. An exotic bird from far away, kept and displayed, buried with the dead as a grave good.

Julius Caesar, describing Britain in the mid first century BCE, wrote that the Britons kept fowl but considered it wrong to eat them, rearing them "for pleasure and amusement". Whether or not he had the religious reasoning right, the observation matches what the bones show.

Eating chicken regularly came later, and in western Europe it arrived largely with Romanisation — the bones start to look like kitchen waste at the same time as the other markers of Roman foodways.

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Rome: Sacred Chickens and the First Real Poultry Farming

Rome is where the chicken becomes two things at once: an instrument of state religion and a farmed animal.

The Roman state kept sacred chickens under the care of officials called pullarii, and consulted them before battles and public business. The ritual, the tripudium, was straightforward: the birds were offered grain, and if they ate so eagerly that food fell from their beaks, the omens were good. Roman writers tell the story of the consul Publius Claudius Pulcher, who in 249 BCE at Drepana was told the chickens would not eat, threw them into the sea with the line that if they would not eat, let them drink — and then lost the fleet. Whether or not the exchange happened as told, it was still being repeated centuries later as a cautionary tale about contempt for the auspices, which tells you how seriously the birds were taken.

Alongside that, Roman agricultural writers — Cato, Varro, Columella, Pliny — describe genuine poultry husbandry: purpose-built henhouses, breeds distinguished by origin and quality, feeding regimes, broody-hen management, capons, and force-feeding to fatten birds for the table. Columella's first-century treatise on agriculture devotes real space to running a profitable poultry yard. Rome also gave the chicken to the whole of western Europe: the bird follows the legions and the roads.

The Romans even produced the first recorded regulation of poultry eating. A sumptuary law of the second century BCE, the lex Faunia, restricted the serving of fattened hens at banquets — a rule you only pass when people are already doing it to excess.

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Medieval and Early-Modern Husbandry

After the western Empire's collapse, chicken bones in Europe get smaller for a while — a real signal of poorer feeding and less organised husbandry — and then recover through the medieval period.

Through most of European history the chicken was a smallholder's bird and a woman's asset. Hens were kept in yards and gardens, fed on kitchen scraps, spilled grain and whatever they foraged, and valued mainly for eggs; the meat was the old hen at the end of her laying life, plus surplus cockerels. Eggs and poultry were common forms of rent and tithe paid in kind, which is why they turn up so often in manorial records. Capons — castrated cockerels, which grow larger and fatter — were the prestige poultry meat of medieval and early modern feasts.

Two culinary consequences of that arrangement still shape traditional cooking. First, most chicken eaten historically was old, working bird, which needs long moist cooking: hence the whole tradition of the boiled fowl, the pot-au-feu, the cock-a-leekie, the coq au vin, and the world's great chicken soups. A tender roast chicken was a luxury of youth and wealth. Second, chicken was the classic food of convalescence across Europe and the Middle East for centuries — broth from a hen given to the sick and the newly delivered — a tradition long predating anyone measuring anything about it.

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Across the Atlantic and the Pacific

Chickens were carried to the Americas by Europeans from the earliest voyages onward, and spread rapidly through the Caribbean, Mexico and South America in the sixteenth century. They also moved east across the Pacific with Austronesian voyagers, reaching remote Polynesia. Whether Polynesian chickens reached South America before Columbus is a live and genuinely unsettled archaeological argument — a claim based on chicken bones from El Arenal in Chile has been both supported and contested on dating and DNA grounds, and it should be treated as unresolved rather than as established fact.

In North America, chicken remained a farmyard sideline for centuries. The commercial broiler industry has a specific and well-documented beginning: on the Delmarva Peninsula in the 1920s, where a Delaware farmer named Cecile Steele is credited with raising a batch of several hundred chicks purely for meat and finding a market for them, which within a decade turned the peninsula into the centre of a new industry. Before that, "chicken" as meat was mostly a by-product of egg production.

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Hen Fever and the Invention of Breeds

Standardised chicken breeds, the kind with names and show standards, are a nineteenth-century invention. In the 1840s a craze for large, exotic Asian fowl swept Britain and then the United States, fuelled by the arrival of Cochin and Brahma birds and by the young Queen Victoria's enthusiasm for them. Contemporaries called it "hen fever", and it had all the features of a speculative bubble, including absurd prices for breeding stock and a spectacular collapse.

What survived the bubble was infrastructure: poultry shows, breed societies, written standards. The American Poultry Association was founded in 1873 and published its Standard of Excellence the following year, fixing what a Plymouth Rock or a Rhode Island Red was supposed to look like.

Those breeds were dual-purpose — decent layers and decent table birds, and outstanding at neither. The twentieth century's decisive move was to abandon that compromise and split the chicken in two. Layer lines were bred single-mindedly for egg number, feed efficiency and small body size; broiler lines for growth rate, feed conversion and breast yield. The two are now so different that a commercial layer and a commercial broiler barely look like the same animal, and neither much resembles a Rhode Island Red.

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1948: The Chicken of Tomorrow

The single most consequential event in the history of chicken as food was a contest.

In the mid-1940s the American grocery chain A&P, working with the United States Department of Agriculture and the land-grant extension services, launched the "Chicken of Tomorrow" competition. The brief was blunt and commercial: breed a bird with much more breast meat, growing much faster, on much less feed. Breeders sent hatching eggs; chicks were raised under identical conditions and judged on growth, conformation and efficiency. State and regional heats fed into a national final held in 1948, with a second national contest in 1951.

Two things made it matter far beyond the prize money. First, it defined a single agreed target for an entire industry, and it defined that target in terms a supermarket cared about: breast yield and cost per pound. Second, the winning genetics — Cornish-cross meat lines from breeders whose names still sit behind today's commercial strains — were bought, multiplied and distributed, so the contest's outcome propagated worldwide rather than staying in one flock.

From that point, broiler breeding became a closed, industrial, statistically driven activity conducted by a handful of primary breeding companies, and it has run continuously ever since. The bird on a modern supermarket shelf is the cumulative product of roughly seventy-five generations of that selection, layered on top of feed science, controlled housing and disease management.

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The Numbers Behind the Transformation

The scale of the change is easy to assert and easy to demonstrate, because the comparison has actually been run. Researchers maintained unselected 1957-type and 1978-type broiler strains and grew them alongside a 2005 commercial strain under identical modern conditions, on identical modern feed — so any difference is genetics, not management.

At the same age, the 2005 bird was roughly four times the body weight of the 1957 bird, and its feed conversion ratio — feed eaten per unit of weight gained — was about half. A separate pair of studies comparing 1957 and 2001 strains on both 1957 and 2001 diets found the same thing from the other direction: to reach a given market weight, the modern bird needs roughly a third of the time the 1950s bird needed, and substantially less feed to get there. Carcass composition shifted too, with breast muscle taking a far larger share of the bird.

Those figures are the whole explanation for why chicken went from an occasional Sunday roast to the cheapest meat in most of the world within one human lifetime. Nothing about the price of chicken is a marketing achievement; it is a biological one, and it is the reason poultry has overtaken pork to become the most-produced meat on Earth.

The ecological arithmetic that follows is genuinely strange. More than twenty billion chickens are alive at any given moment, and tens of billions are slaughtered each year. Researchers examining the broiler as a marker of the human-altered planet have pointed out that the combined mass of domestic chickens now exceeds that of all wild birds put together, that broiler bone chemistry and shape differ measurably from those of any wild or historic fowl, and that broiler bones are consequently a distinctive and near-global signal in the sediments now being laid down.

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What Fast Growth Costs the Bird

Selecting hard for one trait moves other traits with it, and in the broiler the correlated changes are well documented. This section states them as findings, not as advocacy.

  1. Legs. A bird whose muscle mass outruns its skeleton develops gait problems. A large UK survey of commercial flocks assessed walking ability in tens of thousands of birds near slaughter age and found that a substantial minority — on the order of a quarter — had a detectable walking impairment, and a small percentage were barely able to walk at all. Slower-growing strains and lower stocking densities both improve those numbers.
  2. Heart and metabolism. Rapid growth strains the cardiovascular system. Ascites — fluid accumulation from pulmonary hypertension — and sudden death syndrome were significant causes of loss as growth rates climbed, and have been managed partly by breeding and partly by controlling growth in the early weeks.
  3. Breast muscle myopathies. Very fast-growing breast muscle outgrows its own blood supply, producing the conditions the trade calls wooden breast, white striping and spaghetti meat. These are visible in the raw fillet as hard pale areas, white stripes running with the grain, or meat that pulls apart in strands. They are a meat-quality problem rather than a food-safety one, and work on them continues.
  4. Stocking density and housing. How many birds share a square metre, how much light and darkness they get, and whether they have anything to perch on or peck at are all managed variables with measurable effects on leg health and behaviour, and all are regulated differently in different countries.
  5. The breeder paradox. The parents of broilers have to be kept alive to adulthood, which a bird bred for maximum growth cannot easily do while eating freely. Broiler breeding stock are therefore feed-restricted, which is itself a recognised welfare issue and one of the sharper trade-offs in the system.

An analysis of the trade-offs in US broiler production made the tension explicit: slower-growing birds score better on welfare measures but occupy land, feed and time in proportion, so improving welfare through genetics has a resource cost that has to be paid somewhere. That is a real constraint, not a rhetorical one, and it is why the argument is still live.

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Antibiotics: Growth Promotion and Its Retreat

From about 1950 it was known that feeding low, sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics to poultry and pigs made them grow faster on less feed. The practice spread worldwide and became routine. It is now largely over in Europe and much reduced in the United States, and the reason is resistance.

The sequence is well documented. Sweden banned antibiotic growth promoters in 1986. Denmark's producers stopped voluntarily in the late 1990s. The European Union banned avoparcin in 1997 and phased out the remaining growth promoters, with a complete ban in force from 1 January 2006. Reviews of what happened afterwards in Scandinavia found that resistance levels in the relevant bacterial populations fell, and that production continued — the predicted collapse in productivity did not occur, though feed and management had to be improved to compensate.

The United States took a different route and arrived later. Under FDA Guidance for Industry #213, fully implemented in January 2017, medically important antimicrobials were withdrawn from growth-promotion labels and their remaining uses in feed and water brought under veterinary oversight. Large parts of the US broiler sector went further and market themselves as raised without antibiotics.

Two things remain true. Global antimicrobial use in food animals is still very large and, on the best available projections, still rising in absolute terms as meat production grows in middle-income countries. And resistance that arose in poultry is measurable in human infections — the clearest case being Campylobacter, where fluoroquinolone resistance rose in human isolates after fluoroquinolones came into poultry use, a link first reported in 1990 and argued over for a decade afterwards. That story is told in more detail on the food safety page.

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The Chicken Today

What arrived at the end of all this is a bird that would be unrecognisable to a Roman farmer and nearly unrecognisable to a 1930s one.

Chicken is now the most-produced and, in many countries, the most-eaten meat. It is cheap, it is culturally unrestricted in a way that pork and beef are not, and it is nutritionally a straightforward source of complete protein, B vitamins, selenium and phosphorus — the case for which is set out on the protein quality page. Its reputation as a "healthy" meat runs somewhat ahead of the evidence, which is the subject of the heart health page.

Alongside the industrial mainstream, a great deal of the world's chicken is still kept the old way. Village and backyard flocks — scavenging, dual-purpose, locally adapted, genetically diverse — remain enormously important in South and Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America, and they hold much of the species' remaining genetic variation. Heritage-breed and slower-growing commercial lines occupy a growing niche in wealthy countries, driven mostly by welfare and eating quality rather than nutrition.

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Legends, Claims and What the Evidence Says

  1. "Chickens were domesticated 8,000–10,000 years ago in China or India." Superseded. The bones behind those claims have been re-identified or directly radiocarbon-dated and do not support them. The current best evidence puts domestication around 1500 BCE in central Thailand.
  2. "The chicken was domesticated for meat." Wrong for most of its history. The early archaeological record in Europe is dominated by whole, unbutchered, deliberately deposited birds, and the classical sources describe fighting, augury and display. Systematic eating came much later.
  3. "Roman generals consulted sacred chickens before battle." True, and formally institutionalised. The pullarii and the tripudium are well attested. The Drepana story about Claudius Pulcher throwing the birds overboard is told by Roman writers as a moral anecdote — treat the quotation as literature, the institution as fact.
  4. "Chickens reached South America before Columbus." Unresolved. The El Arenal finds in Chile generated a serious argument that has not been settled; both the radiocarbon dating and the ancient-DNA interpretation have been challenged. It is an open question, not an established fact.
  5. "Modern broilers are given growth hormones." False. Hormones are not used in commercial poultry production in the United States, the European Union or most other major producers, and are prohibited outright in many of them. The growth rate is the product of genetic selection, feed formulation and controlled housing — which the numbers above account for completely, with nothing left over for hormones to explain.
  6. "Yellow skin means a better or more natural chicken." No. Yellow skin is a single gene inherited from the grey junglefowl, expressed only when the diet supplies carotenoids — from maize, marigold or grass. It tells you about the bird's genotype and what it ate, and nothing about how it was raised.
  7. "White meat and dark meat are different kinds of muscle." True, and this one is real. Breast muscle is dominated by fast-twitch fibres used for short bursts of flapping and is low in myoglobin; leg and thigh muscle is used continuously for standing and walking, is rich in myoglobin and mitochondria, and is correspondingly darker, fattier and higher in iron and zinc. The junglefowl's habits explain the anatomy.

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Research Papers and References

  1. Peters J, Lebrasseur O, Irving-Pease EK, et al. The biocultural origins and dispersal of domestic chickens. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2022;119(24):e2121978119 — doi:10.1073/pnas.2121978119
  2. Best J, Doherty S, Armit I, et al. Redefining the timing and circumstances of the chicken's introduction to Europe and north-west Africa. Antiquity. 2022;96(388):868-882 — doi:10.15184/aqy.2021.90
  3. Eriksson J, Larson G, Gunnarsson U, et al. Identification of the Yellow Skin Gene Reveals a Hybrid Origin of the Domestic Chicken. PLoS Genetics. 2008;4(2):e1000010 — doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1000010
  4. Rubin C, Zody MC, Eriksson J, et al. Whole-genome resequencing reveals loci under selection during chicken domestication. Nature. 2010;464(7288):587-591 — doi:10.1038/nature08832
  5. Lawal RA, Hanotte O. Domestic chicken diversity: Origin, distribution, and adaptation. Animal Genetics. 2021;52(4):385-394 — doi:10.1111/age.13091
  6. Zuidhof MJ, Schneider BL, Carney VL, et al. Growth, efficiency, and yield of commercial broilers from 1957, 1978, and 2005. Poultry Science. 2014;93(12):2970-2982 — doi:10.3382/ps.2014-04291
  7. Havenstein G, Ferket P, Qureshi M. Growth, livability, and feed conversion of 1957 versus 2001 broilers when fed representative 1957 and 2001 broiler diets. Poultry Science. 2003;82(10):1500-1508 — doi:10.1093/ps/82.10.1500
  8. Bennett CE, Thomas R, Williams M, et al. The broiler chicken as a signal of a human reconfigured biosphere. Royal Society Open Science. 2018;5(12):180325 — doi:10.1098/rsos.180325
  9. Knowles TG, Kestin SC, Haslam SM, et al. Leg Disorders in Broiler Chickens: Prevalence, Risk Factors and Prevention. PLoS ONE. 2008;3(2):e1545 — doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001545
  10. Chan I, Franks B, Hayek MN. The 'sustainability gap' of US broiler chicken production: trade-offs between welfare, land use and consumption. Royal Society Open Science. 2022;9(6):210478 — doi:10.1098/rsos.210478
  11. Bengtsson B, Wierup M. Antimicrobial Resistance in Scandinavia after a Ban of Antimicrobial Growth Promoters. Animal Biotechnology. 2006;17(2):147-156 — doi:10.1080/10495390600956920
  12. Van Boeckel TP, Brower C, Gilbert M, et al. Global trends in antimicrobial use in food animals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2015;112(18):5649-5654 — doi:10.1073/pnas.1503141112
  13. Trithavisup T, Krobthong S, Yingchutrakul Y, et al. Impact of Wooden Breast myopathy on in vitro protein digestibility, metabolomic profile, and cell cytotoxicity of cooked chicken breast meat. Poultry Science. 2024;103(1):103261 — doi:10.1016/j.psj.2023.103261
  14. Further reading on the archaeology of early chicken keeping in Europe — PubMed: chicken domestication archaeology
  15. Further reading on village and backyard chicken genetic diversity — PubMed: village chicken genetic diversity

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Connections

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