CHICKEN was on the menu in the Americas at least 100 years before Europeans arrived. The birds were introduced by Polynesians, according to an analysis of chicken bones found on the Arauco Peninsula in south-central Chile.
It鈥檚 the first concrete evidence that Polynesians voyaged as far as South America, and also suggests that they, not Europeans, were responsible for introducing chickens to the continent. Both topics have been hotly debated.
Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and her colleagues carbon dated the bones. 鈥淲hen we got the date I was gobsmacked,鈥� says Matisoo-Smith. The 50 chicken bones came from at least five different birds and date from between 1321 and 1407. While Columbus didn鈥檛 arrive until 1492, the timescale for the bones coincides with the colonisation of the easternmost islands of Polynesia, including Pitcairn and Easter Island.
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When the team compared the Chilean chicken DNA with chicken DNA from archaeological sites in Polynesia, they found an identical match with samples from Tonga and American Samoa, and a near identical match from Easter Island (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0703993104).
Because Easter Island is in eastern Polynesia, it is a more likely launch point for a voyage to South America. The journey would have taken less than two weeks, which is within the range for Polynesian voyages around this time, says Matisoo-Smith.
