Humans first used chickens for economic gain roughly 2,300 years ago in the Middle East, before Europeans began exploiting the bird.

The chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) was first domesticated in southeast Asia, but its dispersal from that region has been unclear. Lee Perry-Gal and her colleagues at the University of Haifa in Israel analysed animal bones at a site in southern Israel and found a large number of chicken bones, some of which bore butchery marks. Bones from female birds outnumbered those from males two to one, and some showed signs of being from egg-laying hens. The team also saw a large increase in the frequency of chicken bones from the same time period at more than 200 other sites across the region.

Chickens were exploited in this region at least 100 years before they were used by Europeans, the authors say.

Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1504236112 (2015)