Darwin Was Wrong About Wild Origin Of The Chicken, New Research Shows

ScienceDaily (Mar. 3, 2008) — Charles Darwin maintained that the domesticated chicken descended from the red jungle fowl, but new research from Uppsala University now shows that the wild origins of the chicken are more complicated than that.
Yellow-skinned chickens have a different version of a gene than their white-skinned cousins. Darwin believed that all chickens came from a wild species known as the red junglefowl. When the researchers looked for the yellow-skin gene in the red junglefowl, they only found the genetic variant that codes for white skin. More surprisingly, when they finally did find the yellow-skin version of the gene, it was present in a completely different wild species: the grey junglefowl.


"What's ironic is that Darwin thought that more than one wild species had contributed to the development of the dog, but that the chicken came from only one wild species, the red jungle fowl. Now it turns out that it's just the opposite way around," says Greger Larson, a researcher at Uppsala University and Durham University in England.