Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? (10 page)

This was good news for the French poultry industry, faced with devastating losses from what was then called chicken cholera. In the end, however, inoculation proved more expensive and less efficient than isolating and slaughtering infected birds. More important, the development of the first artificial vaccine marked the start of a revolution in human medicine that would help researchers combat diseases that annually killed millions of people.

A dozen years later and halfway around the world, another set of chickens provided a critical insight into human diet and disease. A Dutch doctor in Indonesia, Christiaan Eijkman, fretted over the frequent occurrence of beriberi, a painful illness that swells legs and can lead to heart failure, and like Pasteur, he made a serendipitous find. Budget cuts at his army hospital forced him to change the way he fed his flock of chickens kept for eggs and the occasional chicken soup. He bought cheaper gray unpolished rice for some, while others received the white rice leftovers from the dining hall. Over time he noticed that the former stayed healthy while the latter came down with the disease, discovering the importance of vitamin B, for which
Eijkman and another scientist eventually shared a Nobel Prize.

Chicken experiments paved the way to curing illness, but were also used by the originators of the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century who sought to rid humanity of what they saw as degenerate traits. In 1910, the director of New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Charles Davenport, hired a Missouri chicken breeder named Harry Laughlin, who used his influential position as managing director at the eugenics office to convince Congress to limit immigration of Eastern Europeans. Laughlin saw chicken breeding as a template for improving the human species through scientific selection. He helped push through laws in eighteen states imposing compulsory sterilization on a range of physically disabled and indigent persons. In 1933, lawmakers in Nazi Germany decreed a similar sterilization law based on Laughlin's legal language. Hundreds of thousands of people, in both Germany and the United States, were forcibly sterilized. Both Davenport and Laughlin died before the end of World War II, and eugenics was thoroughly discredited by the policies of the Nazis.

Another eugenicist in this era argued that cells had extraordinary longevity based on his chicken experiments. The French biologist Alexis Carrel, who pioneered the technique of suturing arteries, earned a Nobel Prize and a position at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. On January 17, 1912, he sliced a piece of heart from an eighteen-day-old rooster embryo and kept it alive in a culture of clotted chicken blood as it divided into new cells. This experiment electrified the American public, and the
New York Times
reported annually on its growth and health. Carrel was a member of a scientific committee that proposed sterilizing up to 8 million Americans considered unfit to procreate. He returned to France at the outbreak of World War II to work for the Germans' puppet government based at Vichy and died of heart failure in 1944. The famous still-beating immortal chicken heart in New York survived two years longer before it was discarded when his assistants moved on to other laboratories. Only later did researchers realize that the chicken blood regularly fed to the culture gave the heart cells the
illusion of immortality.

A century after Carrel, biologists seek to transform the bird into a miniature drug factory. Human proteins make antibodies to counter illness, but producing these is expensive and complicated. Egg white offers a tantalizingly cheap and easy way to mass-produce them, as the eggs in Dresden already do by serving as tiny bioreactors. Unlike other species such as goats or hamsters, chickens make proteins in a remarkably similar way to humans. By inserting genes from other species, including humans, into what is called a transgenic bird, researchers hope to manufacture protein-based drugs for ovarian cancer, AIDS, arthritis, and a host of other illnesses at a fraction of today's cost.

At Edinburgh's Roslin Institute, famous for cloning Dolly the sheep, biologists inject a human antibody into the embryos of fertilized eggs. The embryo then is transferred to a host egg, and some of the hatched birds produce progeny that retain the alien DNA. Other scientists in the United States are working on altering rooster sperm so that the antibodies can become part of its genome and then be passed on to a fertilized ovum. These approaches might pave the way for Dresden-like factories churning out cheap human-protein-based drugs with genetically modified eggs. Twenty-four centuries after Socrates asked his friend to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the era of the transgenic chicken is quietly dawning, coming soon to your bathroom medicine cabinet.

4.

Essential Gear

Next to the Dog, the Fowl has been the most constant attendant upon Man in his migrations and his occupation of strange lands.

—Edmund Saul Dixon,
Ornamental and Domestic Poultry: Their History, and Management

T
he chicken's greatest journey was from west to east, across the Pacific Ocean in what was also humanity's greatest feat of exploration prior to the sixteenth century. The Pacific was long the single biggest obstacle in the spread of our species out of Africa. We did not need cultivated plants, domesticated animals, or knowledge of the stars to settle most of the planet. Fifty thousand years ago we already had left Africa, crossed Asia, and paddled to Australia. But thirty thousand years ago, our migration halted on the Solomon Islands scattered just to the east of New Guinea, on the threshold of the deepest and widest ocean. Humans then moved around the Pacific, pivoting north to cross Siberia into Alaska and fill out every corner of the Americas all the way to Tierra del Fuego by at least thirteen thousand years ago, and likely much earlier.

For another ten millennia, this vast Pacific region that took
up nearly one-third of the planet remained beyond our grasp. We needed seaworthy vessels and advanced navigational techniques as well as carefully selected crops and hardy but compact animals that could survive a long voyage in cramped quarters. Not until after AD 1200 did the double-hulled canoes of Polynesians reach the remote Hawaiian archipelago and distant Easter Island. And chickens were an essential element of the gear that people took along.

“How shall we account for this Nation spreading itself so far over this Vast ocean?” wondered Captain James Cook, who commanded the first European ship to reach Hawaii half a millennium after its settlement. Well into the twentieth century, many Westerners claimed that Polynesians must be the remnant population of a sunken continent, trapped on the remaining bits that did not submerge. Others suspected that a hidden southern land just below the islands provided an easy jumping-off point for the simple seafarers. Few imagined that this people could have accomplished such an astonishing feat of colonization without modern compasses, sextants, and large ships.

Cook saw their skill firsthand. At the insistence of the naturalist Joseph Banks, a correspondent with Linnaeus, he took on board the HMS
Endeavour
an artist, priest, and politician named Tupaia while cruising near Tahiti. Lacking all charts and instruments, Tupaia was familiar with well over a hundred islands in a two-thousand-mile radius and knew his location as they moved across the South Pacific to New Zealand. “These people sail in those seas from Island to Island for several hundred Leagues, the Sun serving them for a compass by day and the Moon and Stars by night,” Cook marveled while still on Tahiti. He believed that further investigation would reveal the origin of the audacious venture. “When this comes to be prov'd we Shall be no longer at a loss to know how the Islands lying in those Seas came to be people'd . . . so we may trace them from Island to Island quite to the East Indies.”

Aboard the
Endeavour
, chickens were housed in a hutch in front of the ship's wheel and were an important source of meat and eggs during Cook's lengthy voyages. For the Polynesians, they were something more. Upon arriving at one island in 1769, Banks recorded that
at their reception a distinguished old man “immediately ordered a cock and hen to be brought which were presented to Captain Cook and me, we accepted of the present.” Easter Islanders made a similar offering to the first Europeans to arrive on their shores in 1722 under less friendly circumstances. Within minutes of landing, Dutch sailors shot and killed a dozen unarmed natives for making what they perceived as threatening gestures. The fearful chief ordered chickens given to the expedition leader to prevent further bloodshed. That evening, the islanders brought both live and roasted birds to the ship in order to appease the dangerous foreigners.

“Chickens played an important role in native life, and the remains of the dwellings made for them are much more imposing than those for human beings,” the British archaeologist Katherine Routledge, who surveyed Easter Island's ruins on the eve of World War I, wrote in her 1919 book,
The Mystery of Easter Island.
She recalled that an honored native frequently was asked to perform a ritual to increase the fertility of people's fowl. As Europe teetered on the brink of its Great War, Routledge found herself trying to stop bloodshed between natives and Chilean sheep ranchers. The leader of the native rebellion, a shaman priestess named Angata, sent her two chickens to gain her backing in the uprising.

By Routledge's day, Polynesians on one of the world's most remote inhabited islands were a remnant of the original population, which had been decimated by disease or deported to Chilean mines. Extreme isolation, a small population, a windswept landscape, and eerie sixty-foot-high statues make Easter Island a Rorschach test for the Western world. The Manhattan-sized island is today the poster child of ecological disaster brought on by human population growth and material greed, a cautionary tale for a planet in crisis.

“Humankind's covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn,” a New Zealand and a British archaeologist wrote in
Easter Island, Earth Island
. “But in a limited ecosystem, selfishness leads to increasing population imbalance, population crash, and ultimately extinction.” Author Jared Diamond echoed this grim warning in 1995. “Easter Island is Earth writ small.” The islanders cut
down their forests, ate plants and animals to extinction, and let their society collapse into tribal warfare and cannibalism. “For domestic animals,” he wrote, “they had only chickens.”

Scientists, writers, photographers, and tourists flock to see and study the mute and massive statues, but they usually ignore the chicken coops. When colonists weren't carving giant statues, they seemed to have created coops as part of a sophisticated system of growing crops and caring for fowl. Hundreds of these structures are still scattered across the island, neatly built dry-stone cairns, each with a small entrance secured by a stone door. They were often part of or adjacent to hundreds of walled gardens—some shaped like large ­canoes—that sheltered crops from the blustery Pacific winds. The stout walls protected the birds from their only predator on the island, the rat, as well as bad weather, and the manure may have provided critical fertilizer for the nearby fields.

There is no definitive proof that these coops predate Europeans' time there. Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon who has conducted years of digs on the island, thinks they are of ­ancient Polynesian origin. The coops served as stone quarries to build the nineteenth-century ranch walls that still crisscross the island, and Hunt thinks it unlikely that hundreds of these small buildings could have been constructed in the previous century, when the native population plummeted. The bird had religious, political, and agricultural significance for islanders, and the destruction of their coops to fence imported sheep may have led to the rebellion that Routledge attempted to quiet.

In his 1997 book,
Guns, Germs, and Steel
, Diamond acknowledges that the islanders practiced “intensive poultry farming,” but he is skeptical this made a difference. Even with dogs, pigs, and chickens, Polynesians on other islands could enjoy only “occasional meals” with protein-rich meat. Crops were the key to survival. This view may seriously underestimate the dietary role of chickens and the impact that their manure may have had in fertilizing fields, though researchers have yet to gather the necessary data on the extent of poultry farming on the island before Europeans arrived.

Easter Island was never an easy place on which to survive. “No Nation will ever contend for the honour of the discovery of Easter Island as there is hardly an Island in this sea which affords less refreshments, and conveniences for Shiping than it does,” wrote James Cook when he arrived in March 1774, a half century after the Dutch. He estimated that there were six or seven hundred inhabitants, but didn't know that this population was about a quarter of what it had been when the first Europeans arrived. Hunt argues that European disease was the prime mover behind the rapid population decline, not native greed or folly.

The island's primeval forest had vanished prior to the Dutch visit. Rats, which gnawed palm-seed shells excavated by Hunt, were likely major culprits in the destruction of the forest. During Cook's visit, a member of his landing party observed “ratts which I believe they eat as I saw a man with some in his hand which he seem'd unwilling to part with.” This has been interpreted as a sign of desperation and hunger, but Polynesians across the Pacific commonly ate the rodent. Cook's men also noted staples found on other islands, such as plantains, sugarcane, gourds, taro, and sweet potatoes—“the best of the sort I ever tasted.” There were also “Cocks and Hens like ours which are small and but few of them.” Entranced by the toppled statues, the British, like so many archaeologists who followed after them, may not have bothered to look inside the stone coops.

The discovery of what scientists claimed was a pre-Columbian chicken bone on the western coast of South America called for a major rewrite of human history. With the possible exception of the chicken bone lodged in her throat that sent Elizabeth Taylor to a Virginia hospital in 1978, no single piece of poultry cartilage has ever spilled so much newspaper ink. “Why did the chicken cross the Pacific Ocean?” asked the
New York Times
on June 5, 2007. “To get to the other side, in South America. How? By Polynesian canoes, which apparently arrived at least 100 years before Europeans settled the continent.”

The news was heralded as scientific proof that East and not West
began the exchange between the Old and New Worlds after being largely separate for more than ten thousand years. Polynesians trading poultry on a Chilean shore bridged the divide rather than Spanish sailors splashing onto a Bahamian beach.

The chicken remains were found at El Arenal—Spanish for “sandy place”—on the barren Arauco Peninsula that extends into the Pacific Ocean 250 miles south of the Chilean city of Valparaiso. Archaeologists working at the site found an unremarkable village inhabited for seven centuries until AD 1400. The inhabitants had left behind the usual assortment of pots, jars, plates, and bowls that they used to cook and eat shellfish, quinoa, frogs, ducks, corn, fox, and guanaco, a cousin to the llama. Among these remains were eighty-eight chicken bones.

According to traditional history, a pre-Columbian chicken feast in the Americas was impossible. By the time the Bering Strait opened, effectively sealing the New World from the Old,
Gallus gallus
was still a skittish wild bird in South Asia jungles. If there were truly pre-Columbian chickens, then New World and Old World humans had met sometime after the end of the Ice Age and before Columbus. Until 2007, no archaeologist had yet identified an actual bone, though tantalizing hints abounded of the chicken's presence when Europeans arrived in the Americas.

Shipwrecked Japanese sailors and medieval Irish monks are among the potential importers. The chicken arrived in Sweden by AD 500, and Icelandic breeders claim that one still-popular variety arrived with tenth-century AD Vikings. A couple of chicken bones dating to the late thirteenth century have turned up in Iceland, but there is no sign of the animal at the settlement the Vikings built on the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland. Nor is there evidence that native North Americans adopted the bird before Columbus landed. The first documented chickens in the New World arrived in 1493, when two hundred hens from the Canary Islands arrived with Columbus on his second voyage to Hispaniola—today's Haiti and the Dominican Republic—to create the first known New World poultry operation. A famine struck shortly after, and the island-bound birds likely were either killed for their meat or succumbed to predators and disease.

The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his troops arrived in Mexico in 1519. While dismantling the Aztec Empire, he told Spain's King Charles V that the natives roasted chickens as large as peacocks, sold them in markets, and fed them to the wild animals in Montezuma's private zoo in the center of what is today Mexico City. That zoo, built of marble and tiles of jasper, included a luxurious apartment for the Aztec king. Eagles and kestrels along with wildcats were fed on the fowl, Cortés reported. But he likely was referring to one of the New World's only domesticated birds, the turkey.

Cortés noted a street in the marketplace of the great city of ­Temixitan that sold “every sort of bird, such as chickens, partridges, quails, wild ducks” and a dozen other sorts. Since he doesn't mention the turkey, which surely was an important commodity, he likely classed it as chicken. Ancient Mesopotamians may have dubbed the chicken a “black francolin from India,” and Cortés may have similarly named the turkey after its closest European look-alike. The Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs in central Mexico called Spain “the land of the chickens” since the bird came with the foreigners, a sign that they saw the two species as distinct and the chicken as alien. Since no chicken remains have been found in Mexico that predate Cortés, the bird likely came with the conquerors.